Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood, both of the infamous rock ‘n’ roll band The Rolling Stones, recently debuted new song live called “Rising Hollow,” Stereogum reports. The Rolling Stones held a listening party for their upcoming album Foreign Tongues on July 8 at the St. Clement Hotel in London. Before launching into “Dead Flowers” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Stereogum says that Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood and Matt Clifford (who has joined the band on keyboard for tour) surprised the crowd with an acoustic live debut of “Ringing Hollow,” a song “lamenting the current state of the United States,” which can especially bee seen in the lyric “Lady Liberty don’t look so good when there’s a tear in her gown.”
So this just happened in London… 👀
Mick and Ronnie have surprised guests at a special event, with a performance of Ringing Hollow, from the new album Foreign Tongues – out this Friday! pic.twitter.com/c2mmwL03Z4— The Rolling Stones (@RollingStones) July 8, 2026
While promoting their upcoming album, which releases on July 10, The Stones have repeatedly discussed America’s decline. In their Mojo feature, they expanded more on how this connects to “Ringing Hollow.” Jagger said the song is “about America as an idea. The American Dream is intact for some people, and I’m sure we can find some wonderful immigrant stories that happened in the last 12 months, but we read about the decline of the American Empire. Is the Iran war America’s Suez moment? Well, it’s not the same at all, but there are a lot of questions about imperial overreach, and the lobbying system. The money spent on an election is absurd—it’s not corruption per se but unnecessary. Is it indicative of this administration, or is it something has been happening a long time? In any case, it’s not the same place as it was.” He went on to add: “I lived in New York for 19 years. I’ve seen lots of America that no Americans have seen because people on the coast never go to the clapped-out towns, the middle and the south. Every English band had a love affair with America. The Beatles retained their northern thing, and then John fell in love with New York.”
Keith Richards added, “I take “Ringing Hollow” to be about America when we were growing up in the ’50s. The romance of it all—have cocktail, smoke your cigarettes, play your jukeboxes. We were 14, 15 years old, dying for more black music from America, and slowly you go through the rock ‘n’ rollers and realize that these cats all learned from Muddy Waters. Even now, if I’m stuck for an idea I’ll go back to the blues because the musical form is limited and that makes it all the more intriguing. You’re telling me you can get more out of this thing? Ringing Hollow is our way of saying: we love you.” In an interview with the Sunday Times (via AXS), Richards called the song “a nostalgic love affair with America,” which is “a bit of a disappointment at the moment.”
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