The Rolling Stones are for the young

This essay first appeared in the NPR Music newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this one, listening recommendations and more.Put on your hi-heel sneakers.The best way to appreciate Foreign Tongues, the 25th Rolling Stones studio album, is to take it to the dance floor.

If you're even slightly cognizant of the Stones and you once spent your nights at a rock club, a roller rink, a beach party, hell, a parking lot with a boombox and a keg, when a certain sound kicks in you're going to feel it.There's a sudden spring in the hindquarters and your shoulders start to twitch and shimmy.

Pretty soon the sway takes over, your torso undulating, your legs seemingly hyperventilating.Be careful of your neck because your head is going to start doing rooster moves.

You have been started up.With Mick Jagger as a model, this has been the physical effect of the funky white-boy blues in which the Stones have stayed grounded for nearly 65 years, and the Foreign Tongues rollout has fully leaned into it.Each of the videos released for the album's three advance singles show people in its throes.

The chugging blues of "Rough and Twisted" prompts a dancer in a business suit to disrobe and gyrate like one of the deranged yuppies in Robert Longo's 1980s paintings.For the disco-kissed soul ballad "Jealous Lover," actors Charles Melton and Anya Taylor-Joy perform a tortured duet in the lobby of a seedy motel.

The big-budget clip for "In the Stars" — a blithe if still urgent twist on "Gimme Shelter"-style prophesying — brings the band back into the picture, digitally de-aged to match their Let It Bleed glory days, and features Odessa A'zion in hot pants licking Mick's cheek and swanning through a packed room of musicians, dancers and decadent hangers-on who miraculously multiply as everyone gets their rocks off.The overall effect of Foreign Tongues meeting its public has been appropriately gleeful.Even skeptics about pop-mega producer Andrew Watt's contributions (his ...