ALBUM REVIEW: Foo Fighters – ‘Your Favorite Toy’

For the flat median of contemporary rock music that they are, it’s interesting to consider how many of the Foo Fighters’ recent albums have each pivoted around an individual, core idea. Wasting Light was the raw, analog one; Sonic Highways was the one that took them all across America; Concrete And Gold was the one with all the collaborators; Medicine At Midnight was the one with keys; and But Here We Are was in memory of Taylor Hawkins. And yet, even accounting for fluctuations in quality between them all, they each average out to being Just A Foo Fighters album.

So what do you get when another Just A Foo Fighters album arrives without its own idea? Well, Your Favorite Toy seeks to answer that as succinctly as possible: it sounds like—would you believe it?—a Foo Fighters album. But even if the baseline isn’t being augmented or elevated above, that’s not necessarily an indictment. The Foo Fighters themselves are the most shining example of that, a band who, with few exceptions, are as stylistically straight-laced as it comes, and yet remain one of the biggest acts in the world. That doesn’t happen if there’s nothing here.

To have the most emphatic descriptor for Your Favorite Toy be ‘alright’, then, is probably more praiseworthy than it sounds. At the bare minimum, it’s not another Concrete And Gold where the tilt into tired, old mediocrity seems distressingly close. Dave Grohl sounds pleasantly energised thanks to his snarl that’s still packing plenty of heat this far in. The rest of the band follow suit with playing you’d expect from an outfit of consummate, longstanding professionals who haven’t had all sense of enjoyment sucked away from them. No one towers above anyone else—even drum prodigy Ilan Rubin appears under the edict of not breaking rank—but the strength of the unit holds all the same. Honestly, it’s a minor miracle that the Foo Fighters can still make new music and not have it sound soulless or corporatised to hell and back.

Granted, this is still the most mainstream of mainstream rock albums; being recorded at Grohl’s house doesn’t suddenly change that. What’s more, you almost feel a back-to-standard approach being actively sought after with Your Favorite Toy. When the album opener Caught In The Echo kicks off with a riff sounding uncannily close to Times Like These, some dots do begin to join. Nothing here is off-script to the point of unrecognisability, such is the environment the Foo Fighters reside in. Perhaps the closest is the title track, though that’s because it’s such a mess that you begin to question where it even came from. Not only does Grohl sound permanently doused in static, but the extent to which every instrument has been loudened and flattened is almost overwhelming. It’s also the only time on the album where Rami Jaffee’s keys play a notable part, for an extra handful of salt into the wound.

It’s such an obvious outlier, though; production is otherwise as fine as normal. Even though Oliver Roman is the first non-Greg Kurstin producer behind the boards since Sonic Highways, he seems just as much of a companyman. Clearly, he and the band work to make the sound they like to have, with the precisely zero bells and whistles that accompany it. Again, it’s what you find on a Foo Fighters album—big rock songs with a bit of brawn, rarely enough to be unfriendly but not excessively over-egged either. It’s meat-and-potatoes music whose protein and starch content is through the roof, even on what can generously be called its ‘experiments’ (i.e. the downtempo sizzle of Window and the sorta-funk-rock step of If You Only Knew).

As for the songs themselves…well, what is a new Foo Fighters album if not a vehicle to beef out the mid-section of their catalogue a bit more? Not to say it’s bad, but Your Favorite Toy is unmistakably utilitarian in its practice. As a modern Foo Fighters album, you expect the two or three songs that’ll be slotted into the latest live set, paling next to the hits but willing to be bulked out into ten-minute monsters. If anything, Your Favorite Toy might have more of those than average. Caught In The Echo; Of All People; Child Actor; Amen, Cavemen; all are solid cuts, perfectly in line with the revised standards of what makes a good Foo Fighters song. Asking For A Friend, though, might be one of those rarer-than-rare gems that sticks around, elevated as the album closer but regrabbing a sense of stadium-rock bravado all on its own.

It leaves a more positive lasting impression of Your Favorite Toy as a whole, an album that could easily be dismissed as just another extension for the physical embodiment of rock’s natural inertia. That wouldn’t be an incorrect assessment, but to write it off entirely as that almost seems unfair. Even if they aren’t blowing doors down, it’s a credit to the Foo Fighters that they work to maintain a high floor, and Your Favorite Toy has that in its favour above all else. With some good songs and a sound and performance that couldn’t be more tried and true, even Just A Foo Fighters album can still meet its targets for another cycle.

For fans of: Foo Fighters

‘Your Favorite Toy’ by Foo Fighters is out now on RCA Records / Roswell Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall