The Rolling Stones – Jealous Lover

More Than Six Decades In, the Rolling Stones Brought Back Mick Jagger’s “Emotional Rescue” Falsetto — and a Keyboard Sound Meant to Summon a Bandmate Who Died Thirty Years Ago

When Steve Winwood sat down to play organ and Rhodes on the Rolling Stones’ new single “Jealous Lover,” he wasn’t just adding texture — he was channeling a ghost. Winwood has said his playing was meant to recall the classic-era Stones sound of Nicky Hopkins, the brilliant session keyboardist who graced the band’s records from 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request through 1981’s Tattoo You before his death at just 50 in 1994. “Nicky Hopkins and I were on a similar journey,” Winwood told Uncut, sensing the band wanted exactly that feel. The result is a song that sounds both brand new and deeply, knowingly connected to the Stones’ own history — which is precisely the trick this late-career version of the band has mastered.

Keep watching: The Rolling Stones – Start Me Up · explore the Rolling Stones →

Released on June 25, 2026, “Jealous Lover” is a preview of Foreign Tongues, the Stones’ upcoming album due July 10 and their first new record in three years, following 2023’s Grammy-winning Hackney Diamonds. The track leans into a soulful R&B groove anchored by one of Mick Jagger’s most distinctive weapons: the high, pleading falsetto he made famous on 1980’s “Emotional Rescue.” Over a funky, simmering backdrop, Jagger sings from the perspective of someone trapped by a possessive partner — “Hands off, jealous lover,” he warns, the song’s central plea against being smothered by envy. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood supply the interlocking guitar work, with Darryl Jones on bass and Steve Jordan on drums laying down the groove, and producer Andrew Watt — the architect behind the band’s recent creative resurgence — adding additional guitars, synths, and piano alongside keyboardist Matt Clifford.

The accompanying video brings the song’s jealousy to vivid life. Directed by Chris Barrett and Luke Taylor, whose credits include Radiohead and Jack White, it stars Anya Taylor-Joy as a woman consumed by suspicion that her boyfriend, played by Charles Melton, is cheating. The couple’s jealousy erupts into a brawl in a seedy motel parking lot before spilling, tangled together, into the room itself — a dramatization of the song’s push and pull between desire and resentment. It’s a glossy, cinematic piece of filmmaking that signals just how much creative ambition the band is still bringing to a single this far into their career.

A Band, and a Family, Still Together

What makes Foreign Tongues remarkable is who’s on it. The album gathers an extraordinary cast of guests — Paul McCartney, Bruno Mars, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, and the Cure’s Robert Smith all appear — but its most moving contribution comes from someone no longer here. Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones’ drummer for nearly sixty years, plays on the record through an archival recording captured shortly before his death in 2021, his presence woven into the band’s first new music since the world said goodbye to him. That continuity is the quiet heart of the whole project: a band that has lost members and weathered every imaginable change still finding ways to keep its history alive inside its present. Rolling Stone, reviewing the album, called it a continuation of the band’s late-career winning streak, praising it as more guitar-driven and “holistically Stones-y” than its predecessor. More than sixty years after they began, the Rolling Stones are not coasting on nostalgia — they’re still making records that argue, persuasively, for why they mattered in the first place.