Is it time for the Foo Fighters to just shut up?
Nirvana were the kings, so what does that make the Foo Fighters? Unfortunately, as of right now, more like a damp squib.
A band born out of undisputed tragedy is always a difficult thing to wrestle with. The fact that Dave Grohl even decided to stay in the music industry at all, let alone make a success out of it after the death of Kurt Cobain, which rocked his life, is completely commendable. But 30 years down the road, that line of sympathetic ears has slightly run dry.
To be clear, this is not an attempt to sound callous towards someone who has clearly endured a lot of suffering for their art form, no matter what way you look at it. But what started as a passion project and a channelling of grief back in the mid-1990s has now morphed into something unrecognisable from what it once was, and not for the better.
The Foo Fighters are a band that has never really stopped to take a breath, a lot of the time, which shows increasingly now as the years have worn on. We’re only just past the midpoint of the 2020s, and yet they’ve produced three full albums in that time, with the latest arriving next month.
Bear in mind that they also tragically lost a stalwart member of the group in Taylor Hawkins only in 2022, and it really puts into perspective how much the juggernaut train of constantly pushing out music and heading on the road has really not stopped for breath. That might be forgiven in younger artists with more naivety in terms of the whims of the business, but for a group of middle-aged guys for whom this is far from their first rodeo, the effect wears a little thin.
The irony is that despite the controversy which blew up on their 2024 tour when Grohl took a dig at Taylor Swift, he is fronting a band who are increasingly turning in that same direction of onslaughts of new consumption in a vain attempt to keep their audience appeased. Don’t get me wrong, much like Swift, it works: they’re still selling out stadiums easily and show no signs of stopping.
But that is also the problem. For a band that likes to present itself as rock and roll royalty, and certainly has the experience to justify that image, recent years have shown a pattern of diluting their sound with each release, without having much of real substance to say.
The effect became apparent to me when I went to see them live two summers ago with my family. For a rock band, it was perhaps the dullest crowd I have ever seen. With people constantly streaming out of the stadium to head for the bar or toilet breaks, the Foo Fighters held no command on stage for keeping the audience entertained, let alone interested.
At best, they could be a little more revved up by a turn of ‘My Hero’ or ‘The Pretender’, but when Grohl headed for the B-stage to drag out a random album track acapella ballad that no one had heard of and seemed confused by? Forget it. The crowd was long gone by that point.
Nothing seems to have really improved from that point forward, and with a new album and tour yet again on the horizon, it doesn’t seem like it is going to. On the face of it, compared to other rock outfits on the scene, the Foo Fighters don’t seem like a band of jaded views and giant egos, but if that truly isn’t the case, they have a long way to go in recapturing the spirit of what they once were.
There also is the uncomfortably unavoidable point of Grohl’s own off-stage antics in the past few years. After he announced in September 2024 that he was fathering a child outside of his marriage to his wife Jordyn Blum, he disappeared for seemingly the briefest of seconds while public perceptions of him took their necessary dip.
But it’s almost as if you can hear the conversations of the PR team without even having to be present. ‘Bide your time, Dave, then come back and say you’re sorry. Tell them you’re working on yourself, and everything will be fine!’ It sounds trite, but the scariest thing is that this is the exact situation which has just played out in real time.
With his supposed justifications of going to therapy six days a week and trying to use this as evidence for the fact he is meant to be a ‘better man’ now, there’s no escaping the fact that it has been expertly timed, not to relieve him of the public backlash to his personal woes, but as a promotion for the forthcoming album and its lyrical plaudits.
The man who was once regarded as the nicest guy in rock music has certainly run into a bit of trouble, but essentially trying to worm out of it by revealing the amount of hours (and money) he’s spent lying back on a couch is a pretty slimy excuse, by any standard. Trying to gain public sympathy for being a plainly bad person, and flog your new product while you’re at it, really shouldn’t end well.
But the whole situation has become endemic to the cycle the Foo Fighters have managed to become stuck in, where they feel the incessant need to just churn something else out for the sake of it, even when the circumstances very much warrant a period of silence. Grohl’s life is a mess, but the band hasn’t released anything in a whole three years. Duty calls, and everything else must fall behind that,
If only they could just stop for a second, breathe, and take stock of the path they’re on – it would probably do them a world of good to stop churning out sub-par tracks of guitar riffs and screaming vocals, and remember the reason they started on this whole ride in the first place. For once, the Foo Fighters should just shut up.
