FOO FIGHTERS - Your Favorite Toy

"Your Favorite Toy" is the hardest album Foo Fighters have ever had to finish since they started out. It's their twelfth album, and it very nearly didn't happen at all, given that Dave Grohl announced some time ago that the band's activities were being put on indefinite hold, only to backtrack and claim it had all been a joke played by a prankster. But that was one of the most difficult periods for the former Nirvana drummer, who, having emerged from grieving the loss of his friend Taylor Hawkins, found himself in a moment of deep confusion that culminated in the family crisis that landed him on the front pages of tabloids around the world.

"Your Favorite Toy" could therefore have been a work dense with meaning, far more so than usual - the first studio effort with new drummer Ilan Rubin, formerly of Nine Inch Nails, freshly brought in to replace Josh Freese, who was let go in 2025. The problem is that if you take these messages (and in the end there really aren't that many...) and cram them into the usual container of chugging guitars, wild drum fills, screams and stadium-sized anthems, everything ends up sounding utterly indistinguishable. A kind of anti-art, devoid of any curiosity for exploration, with no taste whatsoever for discovery. Live, they'll no doubt still put on a hell of a show, you can count on that, but the album itself feels almost identical to at least six or seven others they've already made in the past.

Foo Fighters remain, however, masters at turning crisis into energy, delivering a tense, nervy record right from the opening bars of "Caught In The Echo", which, alongside the title track (very Stooges), stands as one of the most successful moments on "Your Favorite Toy". The radio-friendly "Child Actor" also moves along nicely, as does the neatly polished hardcore punk of "Spite Shine". Grohl tells us about friends who were former heroin dealers (on "Of All People") and tries to tackle personal issues, albeit rather vaguely, on the insipid "Unconditional"; "Window" starts off better but quickly loses its way thanks to a lyric that borders on embarrassing.

Fast, thunderous songs that stay firmly within the American band's comfort zone - the reassuring routine of a band held hostage by its own iconography, by the sonic gigantism of arena rock. A predictability that will satisfy longtime fans, but which wipes out any potential for surprise, depriving the listener of that thrill that only creative unpredictability can deliver. Foo Fighters are so good at being Foo Fighters that they've long since stopped even trying to be anything else, trapped inside a gilded perimeter that, however solid, is starting to look like an insurmountable limit.

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26/04/2026