Mick Jagger Teases Rolling Stones Foreign Tongues With One-Third Cover
The rolling stones appear to have pushed their next studio album campaign into public view on Saturday, when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ron Wood each posted one-third of an apparent cover on Instagram. The pieces fit together into a single image, with the band’s name and the words Foreign Tongues printed on each section.
Mick Jagger’s Instagram Puzzle
One-third of the image came from Jagger, and the three posts together seem to complete a face merge across the trio’s portraits. That is the clearest public sign yet that Foreign Tongues is the title attached to the album the band has been teasing for weeks.
The rollout did not start there. On April 25, outdoor advertisements went up around the world using the band’s famous lips and tongue logo in different languages, and the words Foreign Tongues matched the campaign copy. A Friday social media clip then added new music to the picture, starting with vocals that recalled 1969’s Gimme Shelter before turning toward a guitar riff that sounded a lot like Rock and a Hard Place from 1989’s Steel Wheels.
From Cockroaches to Foreign Tongues
The new campaign has been built in layers. In early April, the band began using posters for a group called the Cockroaches, then sold extremely limited copies of a stand-alone Cockroaches single titled Rough and Twisted on April 11. Three days later, a post from the Stones’ official pages seemed to link that single back to the band itself, tightening the connection between the disguise and the real album cycle.
Andrew Watt produced the new album, which would be the first Rolling Stones release since 2023’s Hackney Diamonds and their second since Charlie Watts died in 2021. While promoting Hackney Diamonds in 2023, Jagger said, "We've got almost three-quarters through the next one," and Richards added, "With Charlie leaving us, I think we needed to make a new mark with [new drummer] Steve [Jordan]".
What the rollout leaves next
The picture now points to a band that is already deep into the mechanics of a studio-album launch: title, artwork, teaser audio and global outdoor advertising are all moving together. After a last show on July 21, 2024 at the end of the Hackney Diamonds North American tour, this campaign gives the next era a public shape before a release date has entered the conversation. The release plan matters now because the Stones have stopped hinting at a new record and started showing the package itself.
