(Credits: Far Out / Roger Woolman)
Sat 18 October 2025 19:45, UK
There are few other rock stars that can manage to match the record collection of Dave Grohl.
Countless artists can claim to have diverse musical tastes, but when listening to the best of all time, any band would kill to have a bandmate who listens to everything from The Beatles to Rush to the Gap Band to Ry Cooder with the same degree of reverence. But if there’s one genre that will always hold a special place in the drummer’s heart, it’s metal music.
But when you look at Grohl’s idols, it’s not exactly a big secret why he would gravitate to metal so often. Led Zeppelin often get labelled as the world’s first official metal band in most circles, and while they always distanced themselves from the genre half the time, Grohl was more than happy to shout the praises of their disciples, whether that be Judas Priest, Metallica, or AC/DC. That didn’t always suit what Nirvana was doing when he first started, though.
Kurt Cobain did have a lot of drive behind his amplifier, but his pop melodies almost seemed to be mocking the kind of gruff metal singers of years gone by. He loved bands like Melvins, but the entire ethos behind them was about being the kind of bands that could write melodies on par with their heroes like The Beatles, and even when Grohl started putting out Foo Fighters records, it’s not like he lost that tunefulness, either.
Half of the band’s debut record is made up of the catchiest post-grunge you would ever hear, but there were bound to be a few moments where he could cut loose. ‘Weenie Beenie’ and ‘X-Static’ are phenomenal heavy cuts from their arsenal, but they aren’t the typical heavy stuff you would expect out of a Cannibal Corpse record. It was still about rhythm, and that kind of mentality had been baked into Grohl ever since listening to bands like Sepultura.
While the early 1990s was already a strange time for metal to exist, Sepultura was looking to become the next version of Metallica by any means. They wore their influences on their sleeve, and when they started incorporating more exotic percussion into their music, they had hit upon the basis of what all good groove metal should be, with the guitar solos taking a back seat to the raw power behind the riffs.
It was bound to be an acquired taste for some, but Grohl thought he was listening to pure metal excellence whenever he put it on, saying, “The album Roots is the best recording of a metal band I’ve heard in my life. Produced by Ross Robinson, mixed by Andy Wallace, it’s incredible. [The title track] ‘Roots’ incorporated Brazilian rhythms and drums and it’s so powerful. It’s a fucking metal track with a carnival passing through the middle of it.”
Did that mean we were going to hear Brazilian rhythms baked into Foo Fighters songs? Of course not, but Grohl did eventually have some time to work on his own roots later down the line, whether that was going back to the garage during the Wasting Light tears or on There is Nothing Left to Lose, where he kicks the whole thing off with one of the heaviest riffs imaginable on ‘Stacked Actors’.
Grohl had that music baked into his DNA, and when he finally got the chance to work with Max Cavalera on the album Probot, it felt like he finally had the chance to make headbanging tunes the same way that he used to do. He was more than happy to play the rock star frontman, but it’s moments like this that almost every metalhead has dreamed of when they are jamming away in their basement.
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