The last Foo Fighters album, 2023’s But Here We Are, was a profound act of public grieving, the band’s first music since the tragic death of beloved drummer Taylor Hawkins only a year earlier. “Someone said I’ll never see your face again/Part of me just can’t believe it’s true,” Dave Grohl sang on the LP’s determined anthem “Under You.” For a band whose three-decade run has always been marked by how uncannily well-adjusted they seem, seeing them power through such a major loss in real time made for what was arguably the most emotionally intense listen in their discography. That is, until now. The band’s 12th album, Your Favorite Toy, is the next chapter in that story of fighting through grief and looking forward. Yet where its predecessor often had a reflective tone, their latest is about high-energy garage-rock catharsis, getting in a room and blasting away and letting the noise be your guide.
“Do I? Do I? Do I?” Grohl repeats at the start of album-opener “Caught in the Echo,” his voice distorted in a vengeful blur. He’s asking a question, but it feels like a command, indecision as an honest call to arms. The song bangs: The band’s three guitarists lock into a punk-torpedo riff that could’ve come from a Fugazi record, driven forward by new drummer Ilan Rubin. The song builds tension until Grohl’s drill-sergeant “Do I?”s resolve in a more direct question: “Who can save us now?” That’s something he’ll puzzle through on many songs here. “I’m a puddle on the ground,” he admits on the ominously chugging “Window,” before the guitars let in some sun and he’s brightened by seeing the face of someone he loves. On “Your Favorite Toy,” Grohl howls against shallow distractions through a glam-grunge maelstrom, offering a bit of cautionary rock-star wisdom: “Try not to choke on the glitter,” a passing line with deep resonance in his story. Yet when he sings “Ain’t that a pity/Ain’t that a shame,” on the Sabbath-worthy haymaker “If You Only Knew,” he does so mockingly, as if the idea of getting slowed down by the past isn’t an option, at least not for him.
That doesn’t mean the ghosts here aren’t scary. The album’s most poignant song is “Of All People,” in which Grohl runs into a drug dealer who used to sell to the rock & roll elite way back in the day. The song’s Eighties L.A.-punk riff is poignant, evoking that scene’s less-than-zero ethos, and his sense of horror at seeing this person still stalking the streets hits hard. “You know you should be dead/But you’re alive instead,” he sings. The song engages with a universal moral riddle: Why don’t bad things happen to bad people when the good ones so often leave us way before their time? It’s pretty deep stuff for a two-and-half-minute power-pop ripper.
The response to that apparently inescapable problem comes in a song like “Spit Shine,” a burst of seething guitars and dervish drum pummel where Grohl leaps out of the blur to remind us, “Don’t forget, we’re lucky if we get out alive.” Your Favorite Toy can be slashing and scabrous; sometimes it’s downright bleak (as on the moody assessment of fame “Child Actor” or the pessimistic, politically-tinged “Amen, Caveman”). But at 10 fast, extremely catchy songs, it flies by and demands repeat immersion. Songs here that start off surprisingly bracing resolve into big, sleek choruses, the work of firm believers in the power of heroic, high-protein mainstream alt-rock as a salve against encroaching darkness. The album ends with its emotional centerpiece, “Asking for a Friend,” a statement of purpose that starts out at power-ballad speed and ends up racing to the hopeful horizon. “Searching for something to pray/Words I can use/To lay your worry down,” Grohl sings. He’s found those words right here.
POND Creative*
