Dave Grohl: Foo Fighters Can ‘Turn Into a Death Metal Band’ if So Inclined

Dave Grohl is proud of Foo Fighters' musical diversity when it comes to making records. And he's so confident with it that he recently said the act could go death metal — or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, turn into soft-rock balladeers — if the band he's led for 25 years were interested in doing so.

But instead of settling into "some mellow adult" groove (or death metal, for that matter) on the band's upcoming tenth album, Medicine at Midnight, the rocker instead said, "Fuck that, let's make a party album."

That's what Grohl told NME in a new interview that emerged Monday (Nov. 9) after Foo Fighters performed on a Dave Chappelle-hosted Saturday Night Live over the weekend. The Foos dropped their imminent effort's first single, "Shame Shame," on the same day as the late-night television appearance.

"Since it's our tenth record and 25th anniversary, we decided years ago that we wanted to do something that sounded fresh," the musician explained to the British music mag, as pointed out by Louder. "We've made some many different types of album[s], 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."

But it was in a separate chat with Sirius XM that Grohl dropped the nugget about Foo Fighters' capacity for death metal — or for turning into the type of light pop practitioners helmed by Karen and Richard Carpenter in the '70s. (Watch an excerpt from that interview down toward the bottom of this post.)

"I honestly think we're capable of doing almost anything," the Foos' bandleader told the SiriusXM channel Alt Nation. "So, if we put our minds to it, we can kind of chameleon and turn into a death metal band or we could be like the Carpenters. So, we just have to decide, come together and make the decision, like, 'All right, 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."

Speaking to the satellite radio station, Grohl again namedropped David Bowie when describing the Foo Fighters' sound this time around. He mentioned that he and his bandmates all "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 Stone' Tattoo You."

It's not the first time Grohl has cited that particular Bowie album as having a creative impact on Medicine at Midnight. He first brought it up in an interview with his mother from earlier this year.

"It's filled with anthemic, huge, sing-along rock songs," the musician said in May of the forthcoming Foo Fighters full-length. "It's weird because it's almost like a dance record — not like an EDM, disco, modern dance record. It's got groove, man. To me, it's like our David Bowie's Let's Dance record."

Foo Fighters' Medicine at Midnight arrives on Feb. 5, 2021.