Foo Fighters

Foo Fighters were formed in Seattle in 1994 by Dave Grohl, who had been the drummer for Nirvana. Following the death of Kurt Cobain, Grohl recorded an entire album’s worth of instrumental and vocal demos alone in a single week as an act of personal survival.^[1] He initially released the recordings under a pseudonym before assembling a full band, with the project taking its name from a World War II military term for unidentified aerial phenomena.

The band’s self-titled debut (1995) established their signature sound: melodic, hook-driven rock with alternating soft and explosive dynamics. Over the next three decades, they released twelve studio albums and became one of the best-selling rock acts of their era, known for anthemic live performances and Grohl’s uncommonly personable public presence.^[1]

A defining characteristic of Foo Fighters is the band’s survival through crisis. Grohl has navigated the band through multiple traumas, drawing on the act of making music as a means of working through grief. In 2022, beloved drummer Taylor Hawkins died suddenly in Bogota, Colombia, before a scheduled festival performance.^[2] His death devastated the band and sent Grohl into a prolonged period of self-examination. The band’s album But Here We Are (2023) addressed that grief directly, while the subsequent Your Favorite Toy (2026), recorded with new drummer Ilan Rubin, represented a further stage of reckoning. The album was recorded largely live off the floor without a click track, with producer Oliver Roman, the first outside producer besides Greg Kurstin the band had used since 2014's Sonic Highways. It was originally conceived under the title For Good, a phrase pulled from the title track, before the band changed course to avoid overlapping with the unrelated film Wicked: For Good.^[3]

In 2024, Grohl publicly disclosed that he had fathered a daughter outside his marriage to Jordyn Blum.^[3] The revelation triggered significant public scrutiny and, by Grohl’s own account, deepened an already acute personal crisis. He subsequently entered intensive therapy, attending sessions six days per week for more than seventy weeks.^[4] He has described the experience as a necessary process of sitting with himself and re-evaluating who he is, a reckoning that fed directly into the band’s twelfth album.

That reckoning surfaced again in a more pointed way in 2026, when Grohl described running into someone from his past he hadn't seen in thirty years, a figure connected to the heroin trade that moved through the Seattle scene in the 1990s. The person was alive, healthy, and sober, and Grohl has said the encounter left him simultaneously grateful and angry, a conflict he brought to his therapist and wrote about directly in the song “Of All People,” from Your Favorite Toy.^[9] He has connected the feeling to survivor's guilt more broadly, a theme that also touches his own history in the wake of Kurt Cobain's death in 1994.^[10]

Grohl has cited a wide range of influences across the band’s career, from the Pixies’ loud-quiet dynamics and the stripped-down production ethos of Steve Albini to classic hard rock and power pop. The band has been noted for their commitment to analog recording techniques and for recording at Studio 606, Grohl’s own facility in the San Fernando Valley, as well as at home studios.^[5]

Rubin, who came to Foo Fighters after stints as a touring and recording drummer for Nine Inch Nails and as a member of Angels & Airwaves, made his songwriting debut with the band on “Asking for a Friend,” a track that became a rock radio hit ahead of Your Favorite Toy’s release. The album and its touring cycle arrived alongside the band’s thirtieth anniversary, marked in 2026 by a North American stadium tour with support from Queens of the Stone Age, whose frontman Josh Homme has been a friend of Grohl’s since 1992.^[6]

The band has a history of reviving old, unfinished material rather than discarding it outright. “Unconditional,” a track that eventually appeared on Your Favorite Toy, began as a home demo written years earlier and left unfinished. The band rediscovered it while rehearsing for a UK tour and premiered it live at Emirates Old Trafford in Manchester on June 13, 2024, months before it was recorded for the album.^[7]

Family life has continued to surface directly in Grohl's songwriting. "Window," a track on Your Favorite Toy, grew out of a riff Grohl wrote with his teenage daughter Harper in mind, inspired by her fondness for 1990s alternative acts like the Breeders; Harper ended up contributing to the finished track herself. Grohl has described the song as a deliberate tonal break within the album, and its music video, built around a window cleaner glimpsing the private lives of a building's residents, includes a nod to the band's own history via a resident seen watching the "Everlong" video.^[8]