This isn’t the first time Dave Grohl has grieved in public. When the Foo Fighters debut album was released in 1995, scribes around the world scrutinized its lyrics for references to Kurt Cobain’s suicide, even though the drummer-turned-leader kept saying he had created those songs before his friend leaves him.
No one will need to dig between the lines of 11e album of the American group to see the inquisitive shadow of death appear, which hovers from the first to the last guitar chord. Written following the tragic departure of drummer Taylor Hawkins in March, then that of Grohl’s mother in August, But Here We Are has only one subject: that of the grand depart.
Over the past ten or even fifteen years, the Foo’s albums have often felt like perfectly incidental attempts to justify another tour. This new disc, on which Grohl occupies the drummer’s stool, thus finds in the sadness to transcend, and in the memory to honor of their comrade, obvious reasons for being.
“You showed me how to grieve, never showed me how to say goodbye”, repeats the singer like a mantra in The Teacher (his mother was a teacher), a ten-minute ride in the roller coaster of mourning, to which his daughter Violet lends her pretty voice. A significant presence, because beyond our finitude, But Here We Are is inhabited by the question of transmission, of what those who leave leave behind.
It’s been a long time since the band offered a big unifying chorus as poignant as Rescued, which sets the tone for an album on which the group reconnects at a few key moments with a strike force that had deserted them. And if Foo Fighters is always a little watched by the banality of a generic rock, its proven, almost worn-out formula is here injected with an increase in impetuosity. An extra life.
Rock
But Here We Are
foo fighters
Roswell/RCA