The Rolling Stones have confirmed their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, at a celebratory launch event held inside the converted Williamsburgh Savings Bank — a grand, church-like former financial landmark in Brooklyn, New York. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, aged 82, 82 and 78 respectively, appeared in high spirits alongside host Conan O'Brien, with an audience that included Leonardo DiCaprio, director Baz Luhrmann, actor Odessa A'zion and Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn. The album, featuring 14 tracks, is set for release on 10 July.

The event came after weeks of elaborate teasing. Mysterious posters appeared around London bearing the name "The Cockroaches" — a pseudonym the band has used before — along with a QR code that eventually led fans to a vinyl-only release of the track Rough and Twisted, priced at €10.07, a nod to the release date. Billboards displaying the album title in multiple languages — from Danish to Filipino to Korean — went up in cities worldwide, alongside studio footage posted to the band's website styled to resemble surveillance camera recordings.

Foreign Tongues was recorded over just four weeks in a London studio, a tight schedule that Jagger credited with giving the record its energy. "Only having four weeks gave us an urgency," he said. "You've really got to make five minutes count." O'Brien, who said he had listened to the album 25 times since receiving it, compared it to the band's acclaimed 1972 record Exile on Main St, praising its "vibrancy" and "immediacy." Producer Andrew Watt, who also helmed the band's 2023 comeback album Hackney Diamonds — which won a Grammy for best rock album — returns for Foreign Tongues. Guest contributors include Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith of the Cure and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The album also features drumming recorded by Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, from one of his final studio sessions.

The band touched on their musical range, with Jagger describing tracks that move from country and delta blues to punk, and noted the album's cover — a painted amalgamation of the three members' faces by New York-based artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn — with characteristic self-deprecation: "I call it Mr Ugly." Quinn, who has received numerous offers for the original painting but has refused to sell, described it as showing "how they look now" rather than catering to fans' more glamorous expectations.

Seven decades after forming in London in 1962, the Stones — long regarded as rock's definitive outlaws and credited with introducing blues and R&B to a wider audience — show no sign of stepping back. "You don't just want to sit on what you've done before," Richards said. "There is always something more in there." The band's press release closed with a pointed line: the Stones are "hungry to prove they still have some surprises in store." Jagger, Richards and Wood will each appear separately on NBC's Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon across three nights this month. Whether a concert tour will follow remains unclear.