The Rolling Stones Put Out 'Jealous Lover' Today. It's the Soul Side of 'Foreign Tongues.'

The Rolling Stones put out "Jealous Lover" today, the second song they have let loose from Foreign Tongues, the album due July 10 on Capitol. It arrives as a physical single first, pressed to 10-inch vinyl, 7-inch vinyl, and CD, with the album track "Divine Intervention" on the B-side.

Where the first preview, "In the Stars," leaned on bright pop-rock, this one heads somewhere slower and warmer. The band describes it as a soulful R&B groove, and the center of it is Mick Jagger singing in falsetto for most of the track, a register he reaches for when he wants menace to sound like seduction. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood trade guitar parts over the rhythm section of Darryl Jones on bass and Steve Jordan on drums. Steve Winwood sits underneath it all on Rhodes piano and organ, which is the detail that tells you what the Stones were going for. Winwood's keys are the thing that pushes a Stones blues shuffle toward actual soul, and they have leaned on that move since the Stax records they grew up stealing from.

The song is a warning shot at a partner who reads his every move. Jagger has always written jealousy from both sides of the table, and the one line the band has shared, "You pray like a mantis, you're emerald green," does a lot of work in a few words. Praying mantis, green with envy, a predator dressed as a saint. That is the kind of compression that separates a Jagger lyric from a guy describing a feeling.

Where this sits in the album

"Jealous Lover" is track three on a 14-song record, and the tracklist alone tells you the Stones are not interested in making one kind of album. Foreign Tongues runs from "Rough and Twisted" through a cover of Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" to a closer called "Beautiful Delilah." Jagger has framed the whole thing around range. "The Stones is a rock band, but the Stones also has the ability to do ballads and country music and dance music," he said at the album launch in New York. The band recorded most of it at Metropolis Studios in London, a converted power station, in a room small enough that everyone could see what everyone else was playing.

A few facts about the record carry more weight than the single does:

• Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, plays drums on one track, a fast one called "Hit Me in the Head" that was cut in Los Angeles before his death. It is the second straight Stones album to feature Watts from the vault, after Hackney Diamonds in 2023.
• Ronnie Wood's solo on the album grew out of grief. He was in the studio on June 11, 2025, the day Brian Wilson died, and played a nine-minute solo in one take. The band trimmed it down. Sly Stone died that same week.
• Keith Richards takes lead vocal on "Some of Us," his one turn at the mic, which is the tradition on every Stones album.
• The guest list runs deep: Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Robert Smith of the Cure, who Jagger says wandered into a vocal session in full lipstick and stayed to sing a backing part.

No tour to go with it

If you are waiting for the Stones to take this on the road, keep waiting. The band has not toured since 2024, and Richards shut the door on 2026 dates, saying only "we can talk next year." Jagger sounded more willing, which is the usual split between those two. For now the plan is the record and the singles, with one music video so far, for "In the Stars," featuring actress Odessa A'zion and computer-generated younger versions of the band.

That leaves "Jealous Lover" doing what a good second single does. It shows you a different corner of the album than the first one did, it gives the vinyl crowd something to own, and it buys two more weeks of attention before July 10. Three men in their eighties cutting an R&B side with Steve Winwood on organ is not a comeback. It is just the job, still getting done.