Rolling Stones use AI to de-age themselves in new video

The Rolling Stones have turned memory into spectacle, using AI and deepfake effects to de-age Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood in the video for “In the Stars.” The clip places the band in a 1970s-style setting, with the younger-looking Stones moving through a warehouse-house party scene alongside actress Odessa A’zion, who called appearing in the project “my dream.”

Directed by longtime Stones collaborator Francois Rousselet, the video leans hard into the uncanny valley. The digital work came from Deep Voodoo, the AI company founded by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and the result is less a routine performance video than a piece of synthetic nostalgia, built to make one of rock’s most familiar images look newly consumable.

The release is part of a broader push behind Foreign Tongues, the Rolling Stones’ 25th studio album, due out July 10, 2026. “In the Stars” has been positioned as a lead single, alongside “Rough and Twisted,” as the band builds out an album cycle that now includes a trailer and a launch event in New York. The campaign reflects how legacy acts are no longer selling only songs and tour tickets, but entire eras, repackaged through high-end visual effects and platform-ready clips.

That strategy is commercially shrewd and culturally revealing. The Stones have always sold reinvention, but this rollout goes further by asking audiences to accept digital facsimiles of the band’s past as part of the present tense. The appeal is obvious: younger versions of Jagger, Richards and Wood can be staged indefinitely, with no aging body, no missed cue and no limits on how often nostalgia can be refreshed.

The deeper question is where the line sits between creative experimentation and synthetic self-imitation. “In the Stars” suggests that for icons with decades of accumulated imagery, the next product may be less a new performance than a reusable memory, built to be streamed, shared and resold as long as the archive keeps paying.