Foo Fighters are back. Following their November 7 appearance on US TV show Saturday Night Live, Dave Grohl’s band have released a new single, Shame Shame, taken from their forthcoming tenth album Medicine At Midnight. The follow-up to 2017's Concrete And Gold, Medicine At Midnight is set for release in February 2021, but Dave Grohl is already on the campaign trail, talking up the album.
“Since it’s our tenth record and 25th anniversary, we decided years ago that we wanted to do something that sounded fresh,” the Foo’s leader explains in a new interview with NME. “We’ve made so many different types of album, we’ve done acoustic things, we’ve done punk-rock things, mid-tempo Americana type of things. We have a lot of albums to fall back on, so you just have to go with our gut feeling and I thought instead of making some mellow adult album, I thought ‘Fuck that, let’s make a party album’.
“I hate to call it a funk or dance record, but it’s more energetic in a lot of ways than anything we’ve ever done, and it was really designed to be that Saturday night party album.”
Grohl expanded on the theme in another new interview, on SiriusXM.
Dave Grohl says fans of @foofighters can expect their 10th album to be unlike anything the band has done before. 👀 Hear the full interview on @altnation: https://t.co/ragH9tYtkb pic.twitter.com/C8PUxlIlZuNovember 8, 2020
Speaking on the Alt Nation show, Grohl said: “All of us grew up loving rock’n’roll records you could bounce around to, like The Cars, or David Bowie’s Let’s Dance or The Power Station or The Stones’ Tattoo You. We’re lucky in that everybody in the band has diverse influences and everybody loves different kinds of music.”
“I honestly think we are capable of doing almost anything. If we put our minds to it we can kind of chameleon and turn into a death metal band or we could be The Carpenters. We just have to decide, come together and make the decision like, ‘Alright, which way we want to go?… which way are we going to turn the wheel? And this time we did it to make this party record.”
Grohl also emphasised that his band’s new single, Shame Shame, is not really attuned to the ‘party’ vibe of the upcoming album.
“It’s so dark,” he said. “That song is not really a party. I mean, it’s gotta groove unlike anything we’ve ever done before and it has a dynamic and a vibe and a tone unlike anything we’ve ever done before. Which is why I wanted to release it first.”
“You want to give people some sort of indication, like, ‘Okay, this isn’t exactly like the other 9 records, this is moving in to another territory’.”
The band have teased a clip of the promo video for Shame Shame: the song is now on all streaming services.
Medicine At Midnight is available to pre-order now. Options include a purple smoke vinyl edition, available from the band's webstore. It's scheduled for release on February 5, 2021.
