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Ahead of the release of Your Favorite Toy, Foo Fighters’ 12th album and their third in five years, Dave Grohl disclosed to The Guardian that he had been “in therapy six days a week for 70 weeks… over 430 sessions.” Now, no amount of therapy is too much, but that is a lot of therapy. Clearly, there’s been baggage to unpack for Grohl after 30 years in the band, the harrowing loss of major figures in his personal and professional life, and an infidelity scandal.
On Your Favorite Toy, Grohl works it all out in real time, pulling together reflections on insecurity, grief, the need for forgiveness and validation, and musings about death over Foo Fighters’ now-standard alt-rock formula. The result is confident, energetic, and just disciplined enough to keep its rawest material at arm’s length — so much so that you start to wonder what, exactly, Grohl is still outrunning.
If But Here We Are was Foo Fighters’ knottiest outpour following the death of Taylor Hawkins (and Grohl’s mother, Virginia), Your Favorite Toy is back to business for most of the band. There are all the sonic hallmarks that new Foo Fighters albums boast: sour guitar chords, bluesy detours, stop-start syncopations, low harmonies beneath Grohl’s choruses, a couple punk-forward rippers, and plenty of middle of the road, classic rock-style musicality.
The album is so undeniably from the Foo Fighters that each song could firmly fit in one of the band’s other 11 records. Opener “Caught in the Echo” flies in with a guitar tone that sounds straight out of In Your Honor, with much of the same immediacy and rawness in the production. The contemplative heartland rock found in “Window” is a lot like what we heard on Sonic Highways; the slacker punk in “Of All People” fits right in with the jaded blitz of The Colour and Shape. I’d say that “Your Favorite Toy” and “Amen, Caveman” are the only outliers due to their dance-friendly strut, but then again, they already kind of did that on Medicine at Midnight.
Your Favorite Toy being more of the same from the Foos is not exactly a surprise, nor is it a real flaw of the album. People love the Foo Fighters because after 30 years, they’re still doing their thing. On Your Favorite Toy, that’s mostly a virtue; the album is short and sweet, and a clear step up from some of their sluggish mid-career projects. But the closer you listen to what Grohl is actually saying, the more you notice that the thing he’s doing might also be the thing he’s hiding behind.
On But Here We Are, Grohl often used his lyrics to talk to two central figures he’d lost: his mother and his best friend. On Your Favorite Toy, appropriately, Grohl takes the opportunity to have a dialogue with himself. The title track makes his internal battle explicit — “Dead gardens from bad seeds / But nice guys grow on trees” — a taunting lyric that cuts right to the gap between Grohl’s carefully maintained public warmth and whatever he’s been sitting with in those 430 sessions.
He’s also said that “Of All People” is about running into a former heroin dealer and bemoaning the cruel fates of those he lost to the drug, which is interesting in and of itself. But it also more actively doubles as a song about survivors guilt, about his own existential anomaly. “How can you live happily ever after?,” he snarls, sounding both astonished and accusatory. “Child Actor” is the most revealing, with Grohl likening himself to a kid performing on a movie set and using it to paint a portrait of his own insecurities, the brokenness he masks, and how he generally feels like a fraud.
All of these revelations are what sets Your Favorite Toy apart from Foo Fighters’ other albums. Or rather, it feels like an extension of some of the troubled musings from But Here We Are, where Grohl has exhausted his questions for those he’s lost and now has no choice but to point the finger at himself. There are some moments where the personal becomes universal — maybe that’s “Amen, Caveman,” a roaring album highlight that finds Grohl actually looking out at the world and surveying the wreckage. But for the most part, Your Favorite Toy is Grohl in the confessional booth, absolution not yet granted.
In The Guardian interview, Grohl admitted to an “addiction to achievement” — the compulsive need to fill a goal with another goal, the emptiness that follows when you get what you wanted. Your Favorite Toy is, in some ways, a product of that addiction. It is the 12th album. It is the third in five years. It is another world tour. And somewhere underneath all of that momentum, in the lyrics if not quite in the music, Grohl seems to know it.
Your Favorite Toy won’t be remembered as one of Foo Fighters’ essential albums, but it is maybe the most honest — or at least the most self-aware. Dave Grohl has spent the last 30-some years converting loss into momentum. It’s led to the exponential growth of his band and allowed for his public image to be synonymous with resilience, with showing up, with being rock’s most reliably enthusiastic true believer. And for the first time, Grohl is starting to question this impulse, to see the cracks beneath his feet. But Grohl has also made it clear that, for better or for worse, that momentum can never stop, not even to properly grieve those they’ve lost.
It’s funny that the album opens with Grohl shouting “Do I? Do I? Do I?,” and later on, “Decide! Decide! Decide!” On Your Favorite Toy, it’s clear that they’ve already made their decision. They’re the Foo Fighters, of course they’re going to lace up their boots and press on. Whether that’s a triumph or a coping mechanism… well, that’s probably what session 431 is for.
English (US) · 