Before the Rolling Stones were rock icons, before its members turned into sex symbols and their sound inspired a generation of imitators, they were a blues cover band. Taking their name from Muddy Waters’ Rollin’ Stone and launching their career 50 years ago with ramshackle covers of blues tracks, the backbone of the band’s bones-rattling rock ‘n’ roll has always been their chosen genre’s more soulful predecessor.

But with the group’s first studio album in 11 years, Blue & Lonesome (*** out of four, out Friday), the blues isn’t just the subtext in their songs. Instead of offering a collection of original music, which they still promise to be working on, Mick Jaggerand company covered 12 blues songs from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, going the route Bob Dylan most recently explored with his 2015 Frank Sinatra cover album Shadows in the Night.

But unlike other straightforward covers albums, which are often more exciting in theory than in self-indulgent practice, the songs on Blue & Lonesome are a homecoming for the Stones, as they cover blues greats like Waters, Willie Dixon and other artists whose songs the band cut their teeth on.

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As the Stones have explained in interviews, Blue & Lonesome wasn’t the album the band originally set out to record. While they were in the studio recording new material, they started riffing on a few old blues songs to warm up — and had so much fun, they blew out their jam sessions into an entire collection of songs.

Buoyed by this enthusiasm, the album sounds like the best kind of passion project. Blue & Lonesome proves to be a brilliant vehicle to reintroduce the band, a high-water mark in the Stones’ later era, making the case that they’re as eternally youthful as ever.