Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale Tuesday March 17, and available to order HERE – Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters have discussed the making of the band’s forthcoming new album, Your Favorite Toy, and opened up about the impact of the tragic death of drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022.

In his first major interview since Hawkins’ passing, Grohl reveals how he started work on the music that would provide the album’s foundations as a means of therapy during the turbulent years that followed.

Each day, he would go into his home studio – often in the middle of the night – and start “recording these instrumentals, ranging from something you could hear on [Led Zeppelin’s] Presence to [1982’s seminal punk tape] the Bad Brains’ ROIR cassette. It was all over the place.”

“There was no plan to make an album,” Grohl tells MOJO’s David Fricke. However, he reports that after a year of writing and listening back to the “40 or 50 instrumentals” he had amassed, he found one stretch of eight recordings that were “punchy, fast, energetic” which felt like the seeds of a new Foos’ album. “I said, ‘That’s what we need…’” recalls Grohl.

Out on April 24, Your Favorite Toy is Foo Fighters’ first album with new drummer Ilan Rubin, who replaced Josh Freese, Hawkins’ initial replacement, in 2025. Largely recorded in a matter of weeks in the small studio above Grohl’s garage, the band report that two key guiding lights during the album’s sessions were the punk and hardcore groups they’d loved as teenagers, and the stripped-down techniques of In Utero producer Steve Albini, who died in 2024.

“That was the design going in,” says bassist Nate Mendel. “Dave referencing the hardcore records from the ’80s that we grew up with – blown out, loose and rough.”

“We did it so bam bam bam,” adds guitarist Pat Smear. “I would say we did it punk-rock style but that’s everyone rushing and playing all together. This was like, ‘Somebody needs to come from 10 to one.’ ‘Pat, we need you for four songs.’ OK, got that. It was still bam bam bam.”

“It’s always been about the challenge,” says Grohl. “We’ve been that band willing to try something we don’t know we can do whether it’s Sonic Highways [the 2014 album recorded in different, legendary American studios], working in a basement [where Grohl, Mendel and Hawkins made 1999’s There’s Nothing Left To Lose] or doing it upstairs in my house.”

Not taking in lying down: Foo Fighters in the studio (from left) Ilan Rubin, Pat Smear, Chris Shiflett, Rami Jaffee, Dave Grohl, Nate Mendel. ©Piper Ferguson

A challenge of a far graver kind came with 2023’s But Here We Are, made directly in the aftermath of both Hawkins’ passing and the death of Grohl’s mother, Virginia, only five months later, on which a still shellshocked Grohl played drums.

“We had this idea,” he recalls of But Here We Are. “We were going to record live, the five of us, and we would play the drum tracks from speakers in the room. We’d hit the chord and play along to these drums. But there was no one there. There was just this void, and we were desperately trying to fill it.”

Hawkins’ death, aged just 50, on the night the band were due to headline the Estéreo Picnic festival in Bogotá, Colombia, on March 25, 2022, is a tragedy that still haunts Grohl and his bandmates.

Blood brothers: Taylor Hawkins and Dave Grohl in 2011. ©Lester Cohen/WireImage

“Losing Taylor was never meant to be,” Grohl tells Fricke, the first time he has publicly discussed his bandmate’s passing at length in an interview. “That threw our world upside down and made me question everything about life, that it was so unfair. I still have a hard time making sense of it.”

The parallels between the loss of Hawkins – whose relationship with Grohl, Smear likens to that of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – and the early days of Foo Fighters following the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994 is something the members of the band were acutely aware of.

Grohl recounts that the “heartbreaking experience” of Cobain’s death had driven him to record Foo Fighters’ 1995 debut album, then take it on the road with Smear, Mendel and original drummer William Goldsmith. When Hawkins, who replaced Goldsmith in 1997, died 30 years later, he and the rest of the band “realized this was something we needed to do. Because it had saved us once before…”

“Before, I was running on fumes and unleaded gas. Now I’m just burning fucking diesel.”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our world-exclusive interview with the Foo Fighters in full. Plus! Get your hands on bespoke compilation CD of tracks hand-picked by Dave Grohl and Nate Mendel, only available when you purchase a copy of the new MOJO. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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