🗣️ “One night I was listening to all of these ideas, and there were these 10 songs in a row on my playlist that were all just noisy, loud bangers, uptempo—like back to the old days,” Dave Grohl tells Apple Music. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Maybe this is the record. This is the fucking record right here.’” The story: After wrapping Foo Fighters’ 2024 world tour, Grohl found himself spending a lot of time in his home studio, experimenting with new ideas, recording the ones that stuck and accidentally writing the 12th Foo Fighters album in the process. He hadn’t set out to write with a mission or a deadline, but when he put together 30 to 40 demos, he was immediately taken aback. His bandmates agreed when they heard the 10 tracks of Your Favorite Toy, which clocks in at just over half an hour and rarely takes its foot off the gas. After recording the rollicking title track, Grohl and co. felt that they’d struck “this little vein of gold, and we were like, ‘That’s the feeling, that’s the vibe, that’s the energy.’” That feeling they were chasing is unbridled joy—more than earned, considering the devastation they’ve weathered in recent years. After the sudden death of drummer Taylor Hawkins while they were on tour in 2022, the band took the space to grieve; they eventually returned to the stage to play tributes for Hawkins, and released the cathartic 2023 album But Here We Are, with Grohl stepping behind the drum kit to record its tracks. “We’ve had four drummers in 30 years, but we had Taylor Hawkins as our drummer for 25 years,” Grohl says. “Beyond being an amazing drummer, he was this incredible spirit, this incredible human being. He was our brother. He was our best friend. So continuing on after Taylor was really complicated—not just for us, but for any drummer that was going to come in to fill his shoes.” They took their time to find their rhythm without Hawkins, with Josh Freese joining through the But Here We Are tour before Ilan Rubin was brought into the fold in 2025. It was the aforementioned epiphany of “Your Favorite Toy”, a blistering volley of power chords and throat-shredding screams, that felt like a spiritual reset. “I got to this place where I was like, ‘Okay, so what’s the intention? What’s the ambition? We’ve been a band for 30 years, and as people, we’re evolving and we’re growing—so where do we go from here? What do we do?” Grohl says. “That’s when all of the boundaries just sort of fall away, and that’s where you realise the intention and the ambition is really all within yourself. So whatever’s going to make us jump around and smile and scream, that’s the purest intention.” Standout tracks: Though it has its pensive, sombre slow-downs (notably “Window”, a throwback to Grohl’s grunge bona fides), Your Favorite Toy is, in Grohl’s words, “loud”, “hard” and “chaotic”. All three adjectives can be attributed to most songs, from the disenchanted and overwhelmed “Caught in the Echo” to the Hüsker Dü-channelling “Of All People” and the jaded treatise on fame “Child Actor”. The last word: “This is one of those records where the first side of the record is like a set list—just like bam, bam, bam, bam!” he says. “The second side goes bam! and you get one little break and then it goes bam, bam, bam. They’re raw, they’re noisy, and they have these big choruses that I know people are going to bounce around and scream to. It’s going to be fun.”