From the scream of fury opening Caught in the Echo, the new Foo Fighters album has a clear message: this is Dave Grohl’s return to punk rock. In the late Eighties Grohl was the teenage drummer in the Washington DC hardcore band Scream. In 1990 he joined Nirvana, at that point an underground trio welding stoner insouciance with punk intransigence, and got rather more than he bargained for.
You can understand why Grohl headed towards a more wholesome and, as it proved, commercially palatable stadium-rock sound with the Foo Fighters after the suicide of the heroin-addicted Kurt Cobain in 1994. But recent events have sent him hurtling back to those pre-Nirvana days, when piling into a van and taking off for another chaotic gig in another town was as good as life got.
“You know you should be dead. But you’re alive instead!” Grohl roars on Of All People, a tale of a drug dealer from the bad old days surviving against the odds, backed by the most basic overdriven riff imaginable. Spit Shine, which enters the realm of primeval thrash, takes aim at Grohl’s own insatiable ambitions. “The grass is never greener. Time ain’t no redeemer,” he shouts, which brings a realisation. This is indeed a return to the simplicity of the early days in sound and approach, with the album being recorded over a few days in Grohl’s home studio, but it comes from the perspective of a wealthy, famous middle-aged man taking stock of his life. You can never go back, though, and there is sadness to Your Favourite Toy’s yearning for the innocence of youth.
On top of that, there’s a lot to take stock of in Grohl’s case. In 2022 the Foo Fighters’ drummer, Taylor Hawkins, seemingly a healthy, muscular figure, died in Colombia with various drugs in his system. Then came the announcement from Grohl, a happily married father of three daughters, that he had a fourth child from an extramarital affair. If that wasn’t enough, the guitarist Pat Smear had to miss a tour after a bizarre gardening accident. The Foo Fighters, the no-drama rock band who got to the top through hard work and all-American enthusiasm, turned out to be as complex and fallible as the rest of us.
“Nice guys grow on trees,” Grohl roars on Your Favourite Toy, apparently addressing the fallibility of his “nicest guy in rock” image, before questioning his reason for marital infidelity. “Is that treasure not enough?” he asks of himself. Then there is the doomy Child Actor, another autobiographical song, this one about the thing that drives every lead singer: a need for validation. “Was I ever good enough? Is it me that they see when the cameras are off?”
Ultimately, however, Your Favourite Toy is not a therapy session. It’s an album of tight, loud songs from one of the biggest bands out there, who are pining for the good old punky days amid the problems of middle age. And who can blame them? (Roswell Records/Columbia Records)
★★★★☆