Keith Richards is 82 years old and he cannot always remember how his own riffs go. He has said so himself, without embarrassment, with something closer to delight — the way a man who has outlived most of his contemporaries is allowed to find his own biography funny. When the memory gaps him, he goes back and listens. 'How the hell did that song go?' is, in the context of a catalog that spans six decades and contains some of the most recognizable guitar figures in the history of recorded music, an almost philosophical question.

What Richards has not lost, and what 'Foreign Tongues' — the Rolling Stones' 25th studio album — makes undeniable, is the capacity to write forward. The record has arrived to reviews that critics and fans are describing as a late-career peak, the kind of phrase that gets deployed carefully because it carries real weight when a band has been releasing music since 1964. 'Astonishing' and 'stunning' are words that have appeared in assessments of the album. These are not the grading-on-a-curve compliments that legacy acts usually receive.

The album comes in the wake of 'Hackney Diamonds,' the 2023 release that marked the band's first album of original material in eighteen years and which was itself received as a genuine creative resurgence rather than an obligation fulfilled. 'Foreign Tongues' suggests that resurgence was not a one-time correction but the beginning of a run. Two records in two years, both credible, both reviewed as if the band is operating at full capacity — that is not the behavior of a legacy act coasting.

Mick Jagger, who at 81 remains one of the more physically improbable frontmen in rock, has spoken publicly about the heartbreak that fed into one of the new songs — an experience of being, in his words, ghosted. The image of Mick Jagger being ghosted is so specifically contemporary that it functions almost as a provocation, a reminder that the band's instinct to stay plugged into the emotional frequencies of the present has not dimmed. The Stones have always been, at their best, a band that absorbed the world around them rather than retreating from it.

Ronnie Wood, who joined the band in 1975 and has been its third guitar voice for half a century, continues to hold the architecture together in a way that doesn't always get the critical attention it deserves. Wood is the reason the live band works as well as it does, the reason Richards can stand stage right and play with the looseness he plays with — because there is a second guitarist whose job description includes structural reliability.

Richards has noted that Paul McCartney has expressed that he misses being in a band. That observation, delivered with the satisfaction of a man who has never had to miss that particular thing, says something about the psychological difference between a band that stayed a band and a band that became solo careers orbiting a brand. The Stones have had their catastrophic internal periods — the early 1980s nearly ended them, the Jamaica recording sessions in the early 1970s were a survival exercise, and the Richards-Jagger tensions have been documented in enough interviews and memoirs to constitute a small genre. But they are still, structurally, a band.

What the establishment music press tends to understate in covering the Stones at this age is the degree to which their continued existence and productivity is not a sentimental story. It is a practical refutation of the assumption, baked into the music industry's commercial logic, that rock and roll is a young person's form. The Stones did not invent that assumption — they predate it — but they have spent sixty years disproving it, and they are still doing it.

'If it's a matter of energy, we've got it,' Richards has said. At 82, with his 25th studio album drawing the best reviews of the last twenty years, the statement is not bravado. It is, by available evidence, simply accurate.