'Foreign Tongues' is the funniest Rolling Stones album in decades

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Set us as preferred Here’s a terrible-seeming idea: The Rolling Stones should get started on their next album.Like, now.After taking nearly two decades to release 2023’s “Hackney Diamonds” — the band’s first set of original material since “A Bigger Bang” in 2005 — the Stones are back this week with a follow-up, “Foreign Tongues,” that took them less than 36 months to get out.And it’s the better record in every way.In the old days, of course, two and a half years was all they needed to make “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed” and “Sticky Fingers.” So let’s not get too carried away by the fact Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood are working as fast as they are in their late 70s and early 80s.Yet to listen to the brisk and sportive “Foreign Tongues” is to hear a band clearly going on instinct rather than overthinking the music à la any number of veteran acts in legacy-maintenance mode.I don’t know if the result is the Stones’ best since 1978’s “Some Girls,” but it’s definitely the funniest, which is actually the more impressive achievement.“Wake up in the morning and you wanna make me puke,” Jagger sneers in the punky “Hit Me in the Head” — exactly the kind of lyric you’d hope to hear from a band whose only possible reason for still being in the game is to have a gas-gas-gas.Like “Hackney Diamonds” — and, for that matter, like Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” (to name one recent overthinking-veteran LP) — “Foreign Tongues” was produced by 35-year-old Andrew Watt, who’s made a career of helping boomer icons put a little shine on their late-in-life efforts.

And he’s helped the Stones convene an appealingly motley crew of collaborators here, including McCartney (who plays bass on “Covered in You”), the Cure’s Robert Smith ...