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 the American band’s 11th album to see the inquisitive shadow of death, which hovers from the first to the last guitar chord. Written in the wake of the tragic departure of drummer Taylor Hawkins in March, followed by that of Grohl’s mother in August, But Here We Are has only one subject: that of leaving.
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,” the singer repeats like a mantra in The Teacher (his mother was a teacher), a ten-minute rollercoaster ride of grief, to which his daughter Violet lends her lovely 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 band 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 generic rock, its tried and tested formula, almost worn down, is here injected with an additional impetuosity. An extra life.