The Rolling Stones Release a New Single as “The Cockroaches,” But It’s Only On Vinyl

The Rolling Stones drop a vinyl-only blues stomp under a pseudonym, announce a July album, and remind everyone why they refuse to go away

They put up posters first. Cryptic flyposters appeared around Camden Town and throughout London with no explanation beyond a name, “The Cockroaches,” and a QR code directing curious passersby to a website that asked, in characteristically unsubtle fashion, “Who the Fuck Are the Cockroaches?” The website offered T-shirts, coordinates to record stores, and very little else. Then, on April 10, an Instagram account called thecockroaches2026 posted a teaser video of an unidentified man in one of those T-shirts dropping a white-label 12-inch on a turntable. The caption read simply: “64 & Counting.” The track opened with a dirty blues guitar riff, Mick Jagger's unmistakable voice said “Do it,” and then it cut off.

Nobody was fooled for a second. But the game was irresistible anyway.

On April 11, the Rolling Stones, operating under a pseudonym they have used periodically for secret club shows over the years, released their new single “Rough and Twisted” as an extremely limited white-label vinyl pressing available only at select independent record stores around the world. Sounds of the Universe in London's Soho was the only shop in the British capital with copies. Some stores reportedly received a single digit number of copies. The whole run sold out within hours and was immediately appearing on resale sites for hundreds of dollars. The song itself, for most of the world, only existed as audio ripped from a vinyl copy and uploaded online before the day was out.

The Song

“Rough and Twisted” is a blues rock stomp that sounds, as one fan put it on TikTok, like early '70s Stones with today's production and engineering. That is a reasonably accurate description, and in context, it functions as both a mission statement and a reminder. Keith Richards' guitar riff does what Richards guitar riffs have always done, which is to make everything sound elemental and inevitable. Jagger contributes a harmonica solo that arrives late in the song and lands like a gut punch, and the lyrics read like a fever dream road trip through some of the rougher corners of the world's geography and Jagger's imagination.

The narrator gets driven to a flyblown town where the air is acrid and toxic, fed rancid rice and bones, left drinking muddy water. He wants to be taken to Natchez, Mississippi. To Sicily and Rome. He ends up somewhere near Puerto Rico where, Jagger assures us, the tide ebbs and flowers, and something possibly sexual may be happening. He sings about tyranny and “crazy, crazy fucked-up stuff,” which in 2026, coming from a man who has been watching the world spin for over eight decades, lands differently than it might from a younger artist.

The album title turns out to be hiding in the lyrics. “Why don't you teach me, teach me all those foreign tongues,” Jagger sings, and that line is apparently the key. The upcoming record is called Foreign Tongues, due July 10, and it will be the band's follow-up to 2023's Grammy-winning Hackney Diamonds, their first album since the death of Charlie Watts.

The Record and What Comes After

Foreign Tongues was again produced by Andrew Watt, the generational talent who shepherded Hackney Diamonds and who has become one of the most trusted names in rock production for artists at the back end of legendary careers. The Times of London, which confirmed the Cockroaches story before the vinyl even hit stores, also reported that the band already has at least ten songs written and ready for a twenty-sixth album after this one. At 64 years and counting, the Stones are not running out of road.

What they may not have in the near term is a touring itinerary. The band confirmed late last year that they had scrapped plans for a UK and European stadium run in 2026 because Keith Richards was unable to commit to the schedule. That news disappointed a lot of people, but it did not dampen the creative output, and the Cockroaches stunt suggests a band that is not remotely interested in coasting toward the finish line.

The marketing approach here deserves its own paragraph. In an era where new music typically arrives through a press release and a Spotify link, the Stones went in the opposite direction. Cryptic street posters. A pseudonym with history behind it. A vinyl-only release in limited quantities at independent shops, timed ahead of Record Store Day on April 18. The result was a collective experience, a scavenger hunt that reminded people what it felt like when a new record was an event rather than a notification.

The Cockroaches. Sixty-four years in. Still finding new ways to make you chase them down.