Rolling Stones celebrate 25th studio album

The three surviving members of the Rolling Stones have attended a red-carpet event to celebrate the launch of the band's 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, a follow-up to their Grammy-winning 2023 release.

The 14-track collection will make its debut on July 10 as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood mark the 64th anniversary of the blues and R&B-rooted English rock band that became one of the world's most successful, influential and enduring pop music acts.

The album cover, created by painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn, features a colourful, almost grotesque, three-in-one composite likeness of Jagger, Richards and Wood, their exaggerated, jumbled facial features assembled into a single disfigured portrait.

At an afternoon launch party held at the Weylin, a landmark special-events venue in New York City's Brooklyn borough, the three Stones walked a red carpet, posed for pictures and submitted to an interview session with comedian and talk show host Conan O'Brien.

The forthcoming arrival of Foreign Tongues, a title invoking the Stones' distinctive lips-and-tongue logo, was preceded by Tuesday's digital release of the album's lead single, In the Stars, along with the album's opening track Rough and Twisted.

In the Stars is due for physical distribution on May 15.

Fans got a sneak peek of Rough and Twisted when it was given a limited vinyl-only release in April as a single credited to The Cockroaches, an old pseudonym for the Stones, to stoke buzz about the album as a whole.

Foreign Tongues marks the Stones' second studio album since the 2021 death of drummer Charlie Watts and 25th set of new music since the band was founded in 1962 with a lineup that included Jagger as vocalist, Richards on guitar, and multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, who died in 1969.

Watts and bassist Bill Wyman joined early on to round out the first stable roster of players billed as the Stones. Wood joined the group in the 1970s to replace then-departing rhythm guitarist Mick Taylor, and Wyman quit the band in the early 1990s.

The remaining core trio of Jagger, Richards and Wood reunited for 2023's Hackney Diamonds, then the first album of original music from the Stones in 18 years and a collection that won the Grammy Award for best rock album.

Guest artists on the latest album include Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith of The Cure, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.