Dave Grohl has spent 430 sessions in therapy since the last Foo Fighters record, roughly six days a week for 70 weeks. He’s also publicly admitted to an infidelity that produced a child, fired a drummer after one tour, and spent three years processing the deaths of Taylor Hawkins and his own mother.
Your Favourite Toy, the band’s 12th album and their shortest at 36 minutes, is the sound of a man who has done an enormous amount of work on himself and then gone home and played guitar very loudly. Whether that’s catharsis or evasion is the question the album never quite settles.
Dropping producer Greg Kurstin and recording live with no click track pays off immediately. New drummer Ilan Rubin, formerly of Nine Inch Nails, hits harder than his predecessor, and on opener ‘Caught in the Echo’ you can hear the band breathing together in a way recent records rarely allowed.
The guitars are staccato and sour, the middle eight glowers, and by the time Grohl is bawling “Decide, decide, decide!” over the climax, it sounds like a band seeking resolution, perhaps even salvation.
‘Of All People’ runs on a similar chassis, a slashing punk ripper about running into an old heroin dealer who survived when Grohl’s friends didn’t: “You know you should be dead / But you’re alive instead.” The confusion in that line, part accusation and part astonishment, is the album at its most direct.
Bit it also gets very pointed on ‘Child Actor’, mid-album, with a different texture to everything around it. Rami Jaffee’s piano comes forward, the drums settle, and Grohl writes about performing as a child on a film set as a way of describing what it feels like to maintain a public persona while privately falling apart. It’s the most revealing moment precisely because it’s the quietest one, and it makes you want the rest of the record to follow it there.
It mostly doesn’t. The energy that powers ‘Spit Shine’ and ‘Amen, Caveman’ is genuine, but the songs beneath it are thinner, and speed has always been rock music’s most reliable way of not finishing a thought.
This is the third time Foo Fighters have announced this particular return to basics. Wasting Light in 2011 was the garage-recorded punk rebirth; Concrete and Gold in 2017 gestured in the same direction. Your Favourite Toy carries higher personal stakes than either, and whether those translate depends on the track.
When they do, as on ‘Child Actor’ and the slow-burning closer ‘Asking for a Friend’, the album justifies itself. When they don’t, as on ‘If You Only Knew’, it sounds like a band going through motions they happen to be very good at.
I believe Grohl more on this record than I have in years, which is partly context and partly because a few songs earn it. Your Favourite Toy won’t displace But Here We Are as their late-career statement. It’s a more modest ambition: a man picking up a guitar because it’s the only thing that still makes sense, and a band kind and loyal enough to follow him there.
