Dave Grohl: Foo Fighters’ New Album Doesn’t Sound Like ‘Shame Shame’

Foo Fighters dropped the new, funky song "Shame Shame" earlier this week, and announced the upcoming album Medicine at Midnight. The song showcased an eccentric new side of the band, but Dave Grohl insists that it's not representative of the album's sound as a whole.

Grohl and drummer Taylor Hawkins recently joined Spotify's Global Head of Rock, Allison Hagendorf, on the "Rock This" podcast to chat about the song. According to Grohl, the band started recording the new album around this time last year, and that's when they decided to switch things up a bit.

"We wrote a lot of these songs to be played in stadiums — these big grooves, big choruses, big guitars. It was really sort of designed to be this big party album," the frontman described. "We had looked back on all the stuff we'd done over the last 25 years like, 'We've done this noisy, punk rock stuff. We've done gentle, acoustic stuff. We've done three-and-a-half, four-minute long radio-rock, singalong singles."

"But we've never done like that groove-oriented, sort of — Let's Dance [by] David Bowie, Power Station, the Cars, [Rolling Stones'] Tattoo You — those rock albums that would make you get up and move and dance," Grohl continued. "We haven't done that yet, so we went into the studio with that in mind… I don't even wanna say it's like our 'dance record,' but it's got grooves that we've never had before, so they kind of make you bounce around."

Of the batch of songs the band recorded together, the singer affirms that there were some that were "instantly recognizable" as being the Foo Fighters. However, "Shame Shame" stood out so much to them that it surprised them in a way that bands don't often feel when they've been making music together for a long time. So, they rolled with it.

That isn't to say the entire album will sound like "Shame Shame," though.

"But because it's unlike anything we've ever done, I thought, 'Okay well this is a good place to start.' This should be the first thing people hear because it's indicative of this, sort of left turn that we've taken a little bit," Grohl explained of the decision to make the song their first single from this album.

Listen to the full interview in Episode 5 of "Rock This With Allison Hagendorf" below.