We have confirmed exactly what The Rolling Stones are up to in regard to their new album.
Posters started going up around London last week that read, “The Cockroaches” along with a QR code, which takes you to a website, TheCockroaches.com. On the site is a photo of the poster with a clock above and the date, April 11th. If you sign up for email alerts, it takes you to a site registered to Universal Music, the band’s record label. (See below for an explanation on why The Cockroaches.)
A source close to the band tells us exclusively that they are NOT doing a surprise show this Saturday in their hometown.
What is in the works is a “white label” release — presumably on Saturday — of the first single off their new album, which is titled Foreign Tongues. It’s their 25th studio effort.
The name of the single is unknown and is NOT “Mr. Charm” as previously reported.
The official release of the single will happen in May, and there’s talk of them staging “listening events” for the album before it’s released as early as June.
Foreign Tongues, produced by Andrew Watt, is the follow-up to 2023’s Hackney Diamonds. It contains songs recorded last year as well as tracks left over from the sessions for Hackney Diamonds.
Here’s the backstory on The Cockroaches:
In the late ’70s and ‘early ’80s, the Stones, billed as either The Cockroaches or Blue Sunday and The Cockroaches, did surprise shows in Toronto (1977), Atlanta (1978) and Worcester, Massachusetts (1981). And, when you sign up for email alerts, written above the sign in boxes is “Who the f**k are The Cockroaches?” in the same font as that was on a t-shirt Keith Richards wore in 1975 asking, “Who the f**k is Mick Jagger?”
The Rolling Stones were set to tour Europe this year but scrapped those plans when it was reported that “Keith Richards didn’t think he could commit and wasn’t keen on a big stadium tour for over four months.”
