Foo Fighters - Your Favorite Toy

For a band as storied as Foo Fighters - who, just last year, celebrated the 30th anniversary of their iconic self-titled debut - there’s arguably very little ground they are yet to tread. And so, perhaps it’s apt that on ‘Your Favorite Toy’, the group’s 12th studio album, they decide to simply do what they do best: plug in and play. 

Picking things back up after the release of 2023’s ‘But Here We Are’ - and the untimely passing of drummer Taylor Hawkins that previous year - was never going to be a straight-forward task, such was the heft and weight of the melancholy at the heart of that record. This time, instead, you sense that they decided to throw out the rulebook entirely, choosing to pursue an album of lean, full throttle offerings that waste little time in beating around the metaphorical bush. Recorded mostly in frontman Dave Grohl’s home studio - with some sessions at their LA headquarters, Studio 606 - there’s a raw energy to its tracks that is so often missing from more live-fuelled albums by other acts; undoubtedly a nod to their calibre as a well-oiled touring machine, even with the addition of new drummer Ilan Rubin.

A tightly-wound ten songs - with an equally taught 36-minute runtime, making it Foos’ shortest album to date - ‘Your Favorite Toy’’s first half leans further towards their punk sensibilities, with the likes of ‘Caught In The Echo’ and its title track packing in full throttle riffs and shout-along lyrics. And while the punked-up version of Foo Fighters is so often a thrilling white-knuckle ride, there is the odd moment where it all feels that little too repetitive lyrically (‘Of All People’ is a catchy earworm, to be sure, but it could do with being just a smidgen more dynamic.)

It’s towards the record’s back half, however, that things return a little more to the more wide-screen stadium rock they’ve become so accustomed to. The slinking ‘Unconditional’ soon morphs into a more hope-imbued sentiment, while closer ‘Asking For A Friend’ provides a powerful close, shifting from gauzy epic to thundering gut-punch in the blink of an eye. An album that’s unlikely to make too much of a dent on the band’s epic career this far, ‘Your Favourite Toy’ is a lot of fun all the same.