Foo Fighters will close the second night of Welcome To Rockville on May 8 as one of the festival’s more mature bands, but don’t call them a nostalgia act.
The band has a brand-spanking-new album, “Your Favorite Toy,” released April 24, so fans attending the show on Rockville’s Apex Stage at Daytona International Speedway will have new material to sift through.
The current lineup — Dave Grohl, Nate Mendel, Pat Smear, Chris Shiflett, Rami Jaffee and Ilan Rubin — performed a pair of pop-up shows for fans in New York and New Jersey in recent days.
The New York show on April 30 debuted “Window” and “Spit Shine,” two of the tracks on “Your Favorite Toy.” Five others from the album were part of the two-and-a-half-hour set, according to a USA TODAY report.
This year’s edition of Welcome to Rockville will play out at Daytona International Speedway on May 7-10.
How did Foo Fighters get started?
Grohl started Foo Fighters in the months following the 1994 death of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, for which Grohl played drums. Nirvana was one of the biggest bands in the world, and the shock and grief at the loss of his friend, Cobain, left Grohl hiding.
“Our whole world was turned upside down,” Grohl told the Smartless podcast in 2021. “I decided to go on this soul-searching, find the most remote place on earth trip.”
He described driving around in a remote part of Scotland, seeing a hitchhiker and upon closer inspection, noticing the guy was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt.
“It was in that moment that I was like, OK, I can’t outrun this thing. I need to play music,” Grohl said.
He promptly returned to Seattle and recorded music that became Foo Fighters’ self-titled first album, which was released in 1995.
Grohl recruited Smear to play guitar and Mendel to play bass in the band’s first lineup. Shiflett, a guitar player, joined in 1999. Jaffee, a keyboardist formerly with the Wallflowers, has played with the band since 2005 and officially became a member in 2017.
Rubin is the newest band member, joining in 2025. He plays drums and succeeds Josh Freese, the first replacement for longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died in 2021.
Foo Fighters divide fans and critics
Foo Fighters have often divided fans and critics.
The band has sold 32 million records. Grohl holds the record with 15 appearances as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live.
Rachael Gilliver, the U.K. author of “Send in the Congregation: Stories from the Foo Fighters’ Fans,” plus a sequel, has been in contact with 3,000 to 4,000 fans.
“I found that they all had a similar connection to the band. So many people had found healing and meaning through Foo Fighters music,” Gilliver said in an email to The News-Journal. “These were people who had faced some of the worst hardships that the world can throw at a person, from death to suicide to drugs to abuse to homelessness.”
Listeners “found a place that they could call home,” not just with the band, but its community of followers.
Gilliver said she didn’t know much about Foo Fighters until 2014, when she became interested in the band’s activism around the use of bots in the secondary concert ticket sales market. Talking to fans, she was drawn to the 2011 album “Wasting Light.”
“My favorite song is ‘White Limo,’ and still is,” she said. “I really felt like “Wasting Light” was the band stretching their wings a little more beyond the radio-friendly rock that they’d become known for. For someone who likes their music on the heavier side, the album was the perfect introduction to the band.”
Yet in reviewing that very album, widely considered one of Foo Fighters’ better efforts, some critics teed off.
Greg Kot, former music journalist with the Chicago Tribune and cohost of the “Sound Opinions” podcast, credited Grohl as one of the great drummers of his generation, while the show’s other host, Jim DeRogatis placed Grohl as second only to Phil Collins in rock history as a great drummer-turned-frontman. But in a 2011 review of “Wasting Light,” they didn’t categorize Grohl as much of a songwriter.
“At times, I think of this guy as a journeyman, maybe just a notch or two above that guy from Nickelback. I mean, he writes formula songs,” Kot said. “Dave Grohl is a man who doesn’t have a whole lot to say.”
DeRogatis called Grohl “a rock star” behind the drums with Nirvana and other projects, such as Them Crooked Vultures, Queens of the Stone Age and other bands, but accused his fronting Foo Fighters as “cashing in” while playing large festivals.
“He’s as bad as the guys in Poison, when they play the state fair these days,” DeRogatis said.
Reactions to Foo Fighters’ latest release, ‘Your Favorite Toy’
Anthony Fantano, a music critic whose YouTube channel, The Needle Drop, has more than 3 million followers, recently reviewed the new album, “Your Favorite Toy.”
Fantano said Grohl produced dozens of demos and selected songs that were the most “explosive, aggressive and loud.” So that might serve the Rockville crowd.
“Shorter, louder, faster, more aggressive, new direction for a new record, a new era for Foo Fighters,” Fantano said. “At this point, maybe that is warranted, especially considering just how much change the band has gone through in recent years.”
Despite the attempt at injecting oomph into the music, Fantano said Toys feels like “hollowed-out grunge” with repeated listens.
“This presentation that comes across as just so fiery and so visceral, but then the writing and performances feel just kind of on autopilot,” Fantano said.
The track “Of All People” is a highlight from the album, he said. The lyrics reveal Grohl “kind of wishing death upon this dude who he knew from the ’90s who is still around,” despite getting his friends hooked on heroin and other drugs.
“He’s essentially making this internal monologue about this, like, ‘How dare you survive this era when there were actually many people who I knew and loved who are pretty much dead and gone because of people like you,'” Fantano said.
Gilliver, who said she wishes she could see the Foo Fighters’ Rockville show, predicts the core metal fans there will view the band as a “fun break” with lots of audience singalongs and participation.
“I think it’s because they can lean towards the heavier end of the rock spectrum,” she said. “We definitely played their music in the clubs and I’ve been to metal gigs where you’ll hear the occasional Foos tune being spun in between bands.”
Gilliver likes “Your Favorite Toy.”
“As always, they’ve released something which is catchy with lyrics which stay stuck in your head for several days,” Gillver said. “I definitely think we’ll be hearing a few of these tracks in rotation on upcoming tours.”
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Foo Fighters will play new album cuts at Daytona Welcome to Rockville
Reporting by Mark Harper, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
