At the Stones’ Party for a New Album, Conan O’Brien Cranked Up an Old Joke

Conan O’Brien walked out at the Weylin in Williamsburg on Thursday night and immediately set the tone for a strange kind of celebration. The occasion was the Rolling Stones’ new album, Foreign Tongues, announced barely four hours earlier. But the host treated it like an open mic at a club that never progressed past Tuesday night. “In 1962, a bunch of young men got together in London,” he began. “They played small clubs, but dreamed of bigger things. Then they played slightly larger clubs, hoping that one day they’d reach the big time. Sadly, that day never came.” He paused just long enough for the line to land. “I think this album is going to change things. I think this album is the one.”

The joke is older than most of the people in the room, but it still worked because everyone there knew their role. Leonardo DiCaprio leaned against a wall. Christie Brinkley stood near the bar. Producer Andrew Watt, who shaped the record, moved through clusters of journalists. Odessa A’zion watched from a banquette. This was not a room of screaming fans. It was a curated New York cross-section of media, music business, and the kind of celebrity that only turns up when the invitation itself becomes the story.

The party felt less like a launch and more like a running gag the Stones have been refining for six decades. They keep putting out records that are treated, by them and by everyone else, as if the whole enterprise might still collapse under the weight of its own absurdity. The single “In the Stars” played at some point, but nobody seemed to need to hear it to understand the point. A new Stones album does not arrive with urgency. It arrives with a shared, unspoken acknowledgment that the band has been operating beyond normal logic for so long that a release party can double as a roast.

O’Brien’s bit was not really about the music. It was about the performance of treading water in a sea of early obscurity, even when you are the biggest rock band alive. The Weylin, a former bank turned event space, suited the mood. Its high ceilings and old detail made the whole thing feel like a period piece, a comfortable costume worn one more time for the people who still need it. For a few hours, the Stones were the underdogs again, and a room full of people who knew better played along.