The Rolling Stones – In The Stars

The Rolling Stones Released the Music Video for “In The Stars” This Morning — the Lead Single from Foreign Tongues, the Band’s Twenty-Fifth Studio Album Made in Under a Month at Metropolis Studios in London With Andrew Watt and Featuring Charlie Watts’s Final 2021 Sessions.

The music video for In The Stars went live on the official Rolling Stones VEVO channel at 8:00 AM Pacific time on Thursday, May 14, 2026 — eight weeks before the July 10 release of the album it announces, and nine days after the band confirmed the lead single’s existence at a New York City press conference. Foreign Tongues will be the Rolling Stones’ twenty-fifth studio album. It follows less than three years after Hackney Diamonds in 2023, the Grammy-winning comeback record that had marked the band’s first studio work of original material since A Bigger Bang in 2005. The new album was made between January and February 2026 at Metropolis Studios in west London — an intensive month-long sequence of sessions reuniting Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood with producer Andrew Watt, the thirty-five-year-old Grammy-winning American producer who had worked on Hackney Diamonds. The Rolling Stones recorded fourteen tracks in under four weeks. In The Stars, the second track on the album and the band’s chosen lead single, is the song the world hears first.

The song itself, on first hearing, sits in territory the band has not occupied in some time. The Rolling Stone reviewer Kory Grow described it as opening “as a pop-rock song in the mold of early Eighties Stones” — meaning the period between Tattoo You in 1981 and Steel Wheels in 1989, when Jagger and Richards were writing arena-scale songs designed for stadium playback. Mick Jagger’s vocal sits high in the mix, urgent, multi-tracked into a creamy harmony bed for the chorus. Keith Richards’s guitar carries an instantly recognisable riff — the kind of slightly-shifted open-G figure Richards has been writing for sixty years. Ronnie Wood’s second guitar trades phrases against him. The rhythm section beneath them is Darryl Jones on bass and Steve Jordan on drums — Charlie Watts’s hand-picked successor, who has been the touring drummer since Watts’s death in August 2021 — locked into a mid-tempo groove that opens with a piano figure played by Matt Clifford, the long-time keyboardist who has been working with the Stones since the late eighties. The chorus is where Jagger lands the hook: “It’s in the stars, it’s our destiny,” he sings, while the backing vocals breathe “oooh” around him. A verse later he asks, “Do you wanna dance ’til the roof caves in?” James Hall at The Telegraph called the result “more Coldplay than Hot Rocks” in a three-star review on May 5 — a comparison that locates the song’s musical surface accurately even if the editorial verdict has divided fans on the Stones’ messageboards through the past week.

The Video, the Deepfake, and the Faces from the Seventies

The video — directed by Francois Rousselet, who had previously made the Stones’ Angry clip from Hackney Diamonds and Ride ‘Em On Down from Blue & Lonesome — is built around an inventive use of the AI deepfake technology that has been everywhere in popular culture across the past three years. The post-production was handled by Deep Voodoo, the AI visual-effects studio Trey Parker and Matt Stone built around their 2020 satirical project Sassy Justice. Deep Voodoo’s task on the video was to model Jagger, Richards, and Wood from the early-to-mid-1970s performing the new song in real time. The deepfake versions of the band appear throughout the video — younger, longer-haired, wearing the silk scarves and unbuttoned shirts of the band’s Goats Head Soup through Some Girls period — performing alongside dozens of contemporary musicians, dancers, choirs, and a small group of children, all of whom are real and present at the Riff Raff Films shoot. The lead human actress is Odessa A’zion, the twenty-six-year-old actress whose recent work includes Marty Supreme and Disney’s I Love LA, and who told the production team during her casting that the first record she had ever listened to start to finish was Tattoo You. The video features three additional on-screen “band doubles” — Luca Arshad as Mick, Jonny Weber as Keith, Tyla Challenger as Ronnie — alongside the Hot Property collective playing the broader band. The result, as the Showbiz411 reviewer Roger Friedman wrote in his Thursday morning review, is “kind of an inventive use of the horrible technology. At least we know the music is new.”

The album the song belongs to has been built around the same continuity-and-renewal logic. Foreign Tongues consists primarily of new material written for the sessions, with a small number of leftover Jagger–Richards compositions from the Hackney Diamonds writing cycle, and — most poignantly — material recorded in Los Angeles during Charlie Watts’s final studio session, which took place in 2021 only weeks before his death in London on August 24 of that year. Jagger confirmed at the New York press conference on May 5 that the Watts material was being used on multiple tracks. The album also features substantial guest appearances. Paul McCartney plays bass on at least one track. Robert Smith of the Cure appears on vocals. Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers plays drums on at least one cut. Steve Winwood — the singer and keyboardist whose career with the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, and Blind Faith reaches back further into the same British R&B underground that produced the Stones — also appears. The producer Andrew Watt, who had positioned Hackney Diamonds as a back-to-basics record at the time of its release, has positioned Foreign Tongues in the opposite direction. “It was a month of concentrated punch,” Keith Richards said in the press materials accompanying the release. Jagger called the recording experience “a very intense few weeks” and praised the Metropolis room for the “passion in the room from everyone.”

What This Release Signals About the Band’s Sixty-Fourth Working Year

The Rolling Stones formed in London in 1962. They played their first show as “The Rollin’ Stones” at the Marquee Club on July 12, 1962. They have, in the sixty-four years since that gig, released twenty-five studio albums, sold over two hundred million records, performed more than two thousand concerts, been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2004, won three competitive Grammys plus a Lifetime Achievement Award, and become, by any standard editorial measure, the longest continuously active major rock band in history. The new album makes Mick Jagger eighty-two years old as it arrives. Keith Richards will be eighty-two when the album drops on July 10. Ronnie Wood will be seventy-nine. None of them appear, by any account from people who have been in the studio, ready to stop. Ronnie Wood told The Sun in late September 2025 that the next album had already been recorded and that “you will be getting a new album next year. It is done.” Multiple sources have since reported that the band has written at least ten additional songs beyond Foreign Tongues, which would, if released, make twenty-six studio albums and possibly twenty-seven before the end of the decade. The pre-release teasing for Foreign Tongues has unfolded across April and May 2026 with the kind of multi-platform campaign that contemporary album rollouts now require: a vinyl-only limited release of Rough and Twisted credited to the band’s old alias The Cockroaches on April 11, sold out within hours; twenty photographs posted to the band’s official Facebook page on April 25 from twenty cities in twenty languages with the phrase “Foreign Tongues” translated locally; the New York press conference on May 5 with the official album announcement, the lead-single audio drop, and the unveiling of the Nathaniel Mary Quinn illustrated album cover; and now, this morning, the Francois Rousselet music video for In The Stars that has put the song fully into the world. The album arrives on July 10 from Polydor in the United Kingdom and Capitol Records in the United States. Pre-orders are open across CD, vinyl, cassette, multiple coloured-vinyl variants, retailer exclusives, and a deluxe box set. The single is in stores tomorrow on CD, seven-inch vinyl, and ten-inch vinyl. Sixty-four working years in, the Rolling Stones are still working.