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‘There are better days awaiting, it’s true,’ Dave Grohl tells us during one of the few down-tempo breathers on Foo Fighters’ twelfth album Your Favorite Toy, and a rare moment of personal exposure too. Grohl’s albums, he’s claimed, have always been reactive life documents, each album a response to the one before and reflecting the times that engendered it. 2023’s But Here We Are was a power-rock answer to the pop-inflected Medicine At Midnight from 2021, and also a place to exorcise the grief of losing drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022.
This new record comes amid much marital upheaval and uncertainty in Grohl’s life, and, understandably perhaps, buries its turmoils beneath rather more opaque layers. There’s little revelation to be dug, for example, out of Window: ‘I’m just a puddle on the ground and I saw your face there in the window/You were a window cleaner laying in the sun…’
There’s nothing opaque about the delivery, though. Your Favorite Toy is a ferocious reaffirmation of the Foos’ initial post-grunge power that will overjoy diehard fans, and it hits the ground racing.
Opener Caught In The Echo is an instant Foos classic, with its slashing, staccato new-wave grunge riffs, glowering middle eight and stratospheric climax, Grohl bawling ‘Decide, decide, decide, decide, do I, do I, do I, do I?’ as the song sets out for the sun. On Come Of All People and the title track’s stomping hardcore hoedown, an incendiary tone of melodic garage punk is set. The middle of the road is barely visible; even the gorgeous Window, an interlude of more casual indie rock with a cruising, curling melody, sits midway between recent Queens Of The Stone Age and early solo Frank Black.
There’s a real sense of rejuvenation and rebirth to the record, whichever twists it takes. If You Only Knew is at heart a country blues tune, but freshly clad in white denim. Spit Shine spins and spirals past like a punk club en route to Oz. Unconditional promises a glimmer of emotional light and space in its noir-ish verses (‘Everything hurts, can’t say what’s on my mind, I’m just not sure’) before galloping away into canyon-rock glory.
The back end turns the album’s power-grunge barrels on wider issues: cloying fame on the pleading Child Actor; an increasingly synthetic and unstable world on Amen, Caveman. But the overriding sense of a post-grunge icon doing all that he knows how to do – rocking hardest through the hardest of times – drives Foo Fighters forward, full throttle.
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