This week, Foo Fighters will release their 12th album, Your Favorite Toy. The news prompted a startling moment of self-discovery: Is it possible that I have opinions on every Foo Fighters album? Alas, not only opinions, but also the wherewithal to RANK these records? Shockingly, the answer to both questions appears to be a resounding yes. What have I been doing with my life?
That last question will have to wait for another day. For now, let’s talk Foos!
11. Medicine To Midnight (2021)
I mean it with the utmost respect when I compare Dave Grohl’s work with the Foo Fighters to the culinary skills of the local lunch lady at the neighborhood school cafeteria. It’s his job to make different dishes with the same basic ingredients. Foo Fighters albums are the equivalent of a menu where a revolving selection of tacos, spaghetti, meat loaf, beef stroganoff, and hot dish make the most of a root supply of protein and starches. That’s what Foo Fighters albums are supposed to be, which becomes clear on the rare occasions when the lunch lady listens to complaints and switches up the menu. Oh, you’re sick of the meat loaf? Well, how about tofu casserole? Like that, you realize how good you had it with the meat loaf.
Medicine To Midnight is the Foo Fighters’ version of tofu casserole. It’s their attempt to shake up the usual menu. In this case, that means embracing vaguely funky and “danceable” grooves. (Except in the case of “No Son Of Mine,” where Grohl suddenly decides to sing like James Hetfield. Or like James Hetfield-ah!) The best-case scenario for Medicine To Midnight was “post-grunge Achtung Baby” (or maybe “soul-patch Reflektor“). The album they actually made wasn’t terrible, but like a lot of music released during the pandemic era, it’s instantly forgettable.
10. Sonic Highways (2014)
If you have only a passing familiarity with Foo Fighters albums, it can be difficult to discern one from the other. Sonically, they tend to trod the same musical terrain, as we’ve established. (Even Medicine To Midnight mostly sounds like the usual Foos, plus some extra syncopation.) For Grohl, the distinguishing characteristic is often where or how it was recorded. The self-titled debut was made by Dave himself as a glorified demo tape. There Is Nothing Left To Lose was made in his basement. Wasting Light was made in his garage. One By One was started in Dave’s basement, it continued in an expensive studio, and then it was finished back in his basement.
Dave’s apparent fascination with location, location, location really came to a head in the early 2010s, when he transitioned from drummer and songwriter to filmmaker. With 2013’s Sound City, he profiled the iconic LA recording studio where Nirvana made Nevermind. The following year, he masterminded the six-episode HBO series Sonic Highways, where he visited different American music towns and recorded a new Foo Fighters track in each one.
The TV series is a fun watch — Grohl is nothing if not a gregarious host, and his interactions with everyone from President Barack Obama to (should have been president) Joe Walsh are charming and highly watchable. As an album, however, Sonic Highways definitely ranks among the least essential Foo Fighters records. The songs feel like they were made solely for the sake of the TV show, rather than the other way around. Most of the time, Dave the filmmaker seems a lot more engaged than Dave the songwriter, though the Walsh-assisted “Outside” is a solid “Everlong” rip-off.
9. Concrete And Gold (2017)
I decided right away when I was making this list that any album with at least one single that’s been played approximately 12 trillion times on rock radio would automatically rank higher than any album without a song like that. Not that all or even most kinds of albums should be judged mostly by their hits; I would steadfastly argue against that kind of thinking with most bands. But with the Foo Fighters, one of the most prolific rock radio singles bands of the ’90s and ’00s, it’s absolutely appropriate.
The radio songs add a little extra shine to the filler numbers and make them feel a little less like placeholders. Meanwhile, the ones without that monster track tend to have a middling quality, like a neighborhood block composed only of beige split-levels. Of course, you can’t build a neighborhood of beige split-levels with a lot of… concrete and gold! See how I did that? This album came out in the era when Grohl was solidly installed as the mayor of rock music, where his presence at award shows and in music documentaries as a widely recognized spokesman for guitar-playing fellows born in the 1960s and ’70s made him possibly the world’s most recognizable rock star. It was a point in his career when his didn’t necessarily need hits to sell concert tickets.
8. But Here We Are (2023)
The best of the “no actual hits” albums. The obvious hook of But Here We Are was being the first Foos album since the death of drummer Taylor Hawkins, whose role in the band had long been holding down “second most famous guy” status. The duality of Foo Fighters has always been Grohl’s insistence on presenting it as a “real” band while also doing nothing to dispel the notion that he is by far the most dominant creative force. Hawkins was crucial in maintaining that tricky public balancing act, and his passing was appropriately treated as a major reckoning for the Foo Fighters’ future. (Though their future, in retrospect, never seemed to be actually in doubt.)
As horrible and tragic as Hawkins’ death was, it did put a creative fire under Grohl and his band for the first time in over a decade. While the emotional stakes are obvious — Grohl’s mother also died around the same time — the most immediate aspect of But Here We Are is musical. In the album’s lead up, Grohl compared it to the scrappy, one-man debut. But the jangly, Beatlesque melodies of songs like “Show Me How” are actually more reminiscent of There Is Nothing Left To Lose, one of their sharpest albums, songwriting-wise.
7. In Your Honor (2005)
Foo Fighters’ version of “The White Album.” Only in this case, instead of The Beatles breaking down into solo entities while still recording under a group identity, this was Grohl dividing himself into opposing Daves. On disc one, you have “Rock” Dave, and on disc two, it’s “Acoustic” Dave. And, yes, I mean “disc:” In Your Honor is also Foo Fighters’ “most CD” album. It’s hard to imagine In Your Honor being laid out as it is if it weren’t hawked at Best Buy stores during the height of the Iraq War as two hunks of plastic. But the CD format, glorious invention that it is, liberated Grohl’s most ambitious impulses. In Your Honor covers the entire spectrum of his songwriting styles — you have loud rock songs, and you have quiet rock songs, and all the other volumes in between.
Now, did the world actually need a Foo Fighters double-album? The jury is out on that one, though the acoustic disc does hold up better than I remember. Over on the rock side is the best-known track, “Best Of You,” apparently inspired by Grohl’s work on the campaign trail for John Kerry’s failed presidential bid. It was covered two years later by Prince at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, an historic moment that prompts a question apparently nobody has asked before now: Will Foo Fighters ever play the Super Bowl? I wonder if their window has passed, since the thought of a rock band playing the halftime show at this point seems akin to the halftime show featuring butter-churning and blacksmithing competitions. Their window was probably in the mid-aughts, when they were regularly writing hits inspired by guys who lost elections.
6. Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace (2007)
In the entertaining documentary Foo Fighters: Back And Forth, there is an unintentionally hilarious moment that occurs while the Foos are touring behind In Your Honor. Dave is stressing out about how to reconcile his “rock” and “acoustic” sides in front of a live audience. Will the fans understand the radical collision of loud rock songs and quiet rock songs in the same show? Surely, not since the revolutionary premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet and orchestral work The Rite Of Spring in 1914 had anyone ever contemplated such a confrontational musical presentation. Finally, none other than Clive Davis assures Dave that not only can you have rock AND acoustic songs in the same show, you can even put them on the same album. In the film, Dave acts like this thought never occurred to him until the making of the sixth Foo Fighters album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.
Now, a rock person might look at that title and grunt disapprovingly. None of those words are loud, he’ll say. Fortunately, this record does begin with one of the band’s most rawk numbers, “The Pretender,” along with the slightly less adenoidal “Long Run To Ruin.” But it also extends the singer-songwriter impulses of In Your Honor, like on the Dave-goes-Nebraska track “Ballad Of The Beaconsfield Miners.”
5. One By One (2002)
While preparing to write this column, I naturally looked at Foo Fighters albums rankings made by other people, and this record consistently appeared in the bottom third. This is wrong, because One By One clearly belongs in the middle third of this band’s discography. It might be the most middle of all their records.
One By One came out of a tumultuous period in Foos’ history. Hawkins had recently overdosed and nearly died, and Grohl was playing drums with Queens Of The Stone Age, which, judging by Back And Forth, apparently P.O.’ed Hawkins and even their normally unflappable bass player Nate Mendel. When they originally made One By One, it allegedly sounded so lifeless that their management expressed misgivings about even putting it out. Eventually, they got it together and ripped out a new version in just one week, including the two most winning songs, “Times Like These” and “All My Life.”
Part of my affection for One By One is how it captures what it felt like to be 24 in the early aughts. In my case, it meant getting stoned constantly and listening to Songs For The Deaf. This record sounds like Dave Grohl living the same lifestyle. “Mainstream rock bands attempting to make their own Queens Of The Stone Age record” was a genre onto itself in 2002. One By One is the second-best example. (The best is Weezer’s Maladroit.)
4. Wasting Light (2011)
Typically regarded as the last great Foo Fighters album. Though I think that reputation is slightly off; “the last quite good Foo Fighters album” is more like it. It’s inarguably the last Foo Fighters album to spin off massive radio-dominating hits. In this case, “Rope” and “Walk” are definitively Foos-esque — the latter track, especially, is the proverbial “I would play this song for an alien to sum up this whole band’s deal” song. Quiet first verse, pop-metallic second verse, huge chorus, even huger revival of the chorus, an even more ginormous vocal breakdown, and an overall simple-to-digest message perfectly suited for an NFL pre-game show: I’m learninggg to waaaaalk agaiiiin. Hell yeah Dave, pass the B-W-3’s.
Otherwise, this feels like Foo Fighters coming full circle. Incredibly, this was the first time they worked with Butch Vig, though it goes to show how weird that would have been closer to the blast radius of Nirvana’s implosion. But by Wasting Light, Foo Fighters had firmly put a lot of real estate between Grohl and his former band, to the point where they seemed almost wholly unrelated to that group. By then, they seemed no more indebted to Nirvana’s legacy than Seether or Shinedown.
3. There Is Nothing Left To Lose (1999)
The actual “last great Foo Fighters album.” The appeal, again, is a time-and-place thing. There Is Nothing Left To Lose was released in 1999, the last innocent year in the history of mankind, and it sounds like it. I can’t remember if “Learn To Fly” was featured on the American Pie soundtrack, but if it’s not, it should have been. The rest of the album has a similar plasticky-pop quality that holds up mostly well and remains mostly endearing. Even when Dave gets vicious — like the album-opening “Stacked Actors,” one of the many songs possibly/probably about his lifelong nemesis Courtney Love — the music delivers carefree “starry summertime night at the county fair” escapism. It’s odd that “Learn To Fly” is the only real hit here, because so many of the tracks sound like familiar smashes to me (“Breakout,” “Gimme Stitches,” “Ain’t It The Life,” the epochal “Next Year”). Though that is likely just a product of me playing this CD on repeat well into the winter and spring of 2000, my last semester of college. And, sorry, but that last tidbit of autobiography is the skeleton key for understanding this whole column. In 2026, There Is Nothing Left To Lose is surely the go-to soundtrack for Gen-X grandpas hanging out alone in their garages, toasting to the good old days.
2. The Colour And The Shape (1997)
Their second album, but, really, their actual first album. Working with Gil Norton, Grohl built the definitive post-grunge Wall Of Sound defined by shiny-as-hell guitars, loud-as-hell drums played with an assassin’s precision, and extremely pushy and impossible-to-resist hooks. It was everything that Kurt Cobain wanted In Utero to not sound like. But, to his credit, Grohl fairly early on realized that he wasn’t like Kurt and it was pointless to pretend like he was, especially since the rock world was very different by 1997. That Foo Fighters managed to survive and thrive during the age of nü-metal, when pretty much every other alt-rock institution from the early ’90s withered and/or died, is an achievement that can’t be underestimated. On The Colour And The Shape, Grohl showed his willingness to play ball (the none-more-KROQ-sounding “Monkey Wrench”) while aping art-metal/emo dynamics (“My Hero”) and sneaking in something moodier and more sensitive (“Everlong,” still his finest artistic accomplishment). Not only one of the most successful and influential mainstream rock albums of its era, but along among the best and most enduring.
1. Foo Fighters (1995)
Sue me — I’m old. I know there’s a generation below me who grew up on the mid-aughts albums and likely care about them more than the very early Foos. But I grew up on Nirvana, and I’ve matured along with Grohl, and the self-titled debut remains, easily, their most likeable and re-listenable album. In comparison to the future albums, it almost sounds quirky — like Paul McCartney after The Beatles, Grohl set about to make an album of low-key pop songs by himself. (Dave is even as good at drumming at Paul, almost!) However, unlike Paul’s first LP, the debut Foo Fighters album became a surprise sensation on radio and MTV, thanks to its genial self-effacing vibe and the band’s proclivity for turning out goofy music videos. But more than those factors, this record was an alt-hit Buzz Bin machine: “This Is A Call,” “I’ll Stick Around, “Big Me,” “Alone + Easy Target,” the charming George Harrison homage “Oh, George,” and so on. Again, it’s weird to remember this now, but there was a brief moment when this band actually seemed like an underdog. After all, nobody expected the drummer from Nirvana to amount to much. But here we are.
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