The Rolling Stones Launch Foreign Tongues in a Williamsburg Vault With Conan O’Brien

The Weylin in Williamsburg felt half-crypt and half-congregation on a humid Brooklyn evening: a domed, 19th-century bank turned events space whose vintage vault door swung open like a curtain. When Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood stepped out into that small, reverberant room to join Conan O’Brien, it landed less as a corporate rollout and more like a private séance for people who grew up with stadium blur in their ears.

Hours after officially announcing Foreign Tongues — a 14-track LP due July 10 via Capitol — the Stones gathered in front of a crowd that was equal parts longtime acolyte and press pack. Conan, who admitted he’d listened to the album “25 times,” split the difference between fanboy and straight man. He opened with, “This is the gig of a lifetime,” and for once the line didn’t feel hyperbole; the intimacy of the room made decades of myth feel tactile and slightly absurd.

“This is the gig of a lifetime,” Conan O’Brien said as the band took the stage.

The conversation moved fast and often sideways. Jagger, cheeky and alert, shrugged off a compliment about sounding like his 1968 self—”Well, I was taking a lot of drugs in ’68,” he said with a smirk—while Richards prowled at the edges of the microphone, muttering and grinning in his way. At one point Conan had to reach between the chairs to place the mic to Keef’s lips; Richards laughed, “That’s the Irish in you!” and later yelled, in mock complaint about the room’s acoustics, at producer Andrew Watt who was sitting in the front row.

The lineup for Foreign Tongues reads like a who’s-who of late-career roll calls: Paul McCartney, Robert Smith of The Cure, Steve Winwood, Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers, and longtime Stones associates Darryl Jones, Matt Clifford and Steve Jordan. Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, is also present on the record via one of his last studio sessions. The way those guests arrived felt as random and human as the songs themselves.

“I turned up one day to do my vocals in London and there’s this bloke standing there with his back to me with a long gown on,” Jagger recounted about Robert Smith. “When he turned round he was covered in lipstick. We’d never met before and I said, ‘You are Robert Smith of The Cure!’ And he said, ‘Yeah!'”

That anecdote—Smith in a gown and lipstick, an almost cinematic misrecognition—got the crowd laughing. Jagger’s point was plain: some collaborations are accidental, born out of rooms and timing rather than strategy. Ronnie Wood gave the McCartney story a simpler arc: Paul wanted to tick off a life’s item. “He says, ‘Now I can say I’ve played with the Rolling Stones. Wow!'” Wood reported, amused and not remotely snide.

The Stones also nudged at how they’ve been teasing the album. Mid-April they released the lead track “Rough and Twisted” on vinyl under the pseudonym The Cockroaches; on May 5 the more melodic “In the Stars” appeared on streaming services. These moves—vinyl-only subterfuge followed by a more conventional single—felt tailor-made for a band that’s still playing games with format and fan attention after six decades of doing it their way.

There were theatrical moments beyond the vault door. Richards, in particular, was a live-wire: playful, at times evasive, a man who seems to misplace microphones as a kind of affect. Conan joked about gluing the mic to his face; Richards shot back some of the night’s best offhand lines. The audience loved it—this was a crowd hungry for lore and satiated by small, human slips and jabs rather than spectacle.

It’s worth remembering context. Last year’s Hackney Diamonds peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on Top Album Sales; the subsequent 18-date summer 2024 run grossed roughly $235 million, per Billboard Boxscore. The Stones have used New York as a sort of launchpad in recent years—Hackney Diamonds got a companion event at The Racket in Manhattan in October 2023 with Lady Gaga—which makes this Brooklyn gathering feel like another deliberate, slightly winked-at chapter.

Conan’s stage presence and the band’s easygoing, lightly combative banter made the launch feel less like a press conference and more like an extended, cracked-open family chat. You came away with concrete details—the guest list, the vinyl trick, Watt’s stern-faced attendance—but also with that lingering sense that for the Stones the work is still a social thing: people turning up in gowns, forgotten mics, producers in the room, old friends dropping in.

Will they tour on Foreign Tongues? No answer yet. But if the night at The Weylin proved anything, it’s that the Rolling Stones remain experts at turning the ordinary logistics of album promotion into an oddly intimate event that fans will talk about for weeks. There was humor, a few sharp musical boasts, and a reminder that even after all this time their real show is as much about the small backstage moments as it is about the big chorus.