In 1994, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl began his own solo venture in the music industry after Kurt Cobain’s death. Within a year, his solo effort had grown and sparked the beginning of the Foo Fighters. Over the span of two decades, the band has become one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, selling over 11 million albums and winning four Grammy Awards. This past Monday marked the release of their eighth studio album, “Sonic Highways.”
Following the release of their chart-topping 2011 album “Wasting Light,” everyone had high expectations for what would come next from Grohl and the band. They didn’t disappoint. “Sonic Highways” is much more than just an eight-track album, and perhaps that’s because their process of creating and recording the album was different than any other.
The band spent a week recording each of the eight tracks in a different United States city. While in each city, Grohl interviewed local, influential musicians to learn about how music had affected each area and how the area had affected each artist’s music. On the last day spent recording in each city, Grohl used what he learned from the interviews and experiences to write lyrics for that week’s track.
The album begins with “Something from Nothing,” which is the centerpiece of the first episode of the band’s HBO Documentary, “Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways,” directed by Grohl himself. This song is one of the strongest on the album, and a perfect introduction. Beginning with a single guitar and soft vocals, it builds up into an explosive sound with Grohl’s classic roar. Recorded in Chicago, the lyrics touch upon the Chicago fire, Buddy Guy and how the music of the windy city is truly “something from nothing.”
The album showcases the Foo Fighters’ rapid-fire sound in the Washington D.C. song “The Feast and the Famine,” which sounds as if it could be the background track to an ESPN highlight reel. On the opposite end, the Seattle-recorded track “Subterranean” brings a slow hypnotic sound led by an acoustic guitar.
In addition to the album, Foo Fighters fans can revel in the aforementioned companion television series on HBO. Each hour-long episode, airing Friday nights at 11 p.m., follows the band in a different city while they record. (Tonight’s episode takes the band to Los Angeles.) Everything from rehearsals to interviews to lessons on each city’s musical history is filmed and narrated by Grohl. Throughout the journey, the band was accompanied by notable musicians like Dave Matthews, Joe Walsh and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
This album is packed with the gut-punching sound that has come to be expected of this rock star band. Though it’s well crafted, it spawns an underwhelming feeling and a desire for more within the listener. While this could be attributed to the short tracklist, it also seems that the band lost part of its sound somewhere along the way by trying to accommodate the sound of each city.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is the band’s eighth studio album in their 20th year of existence, and it’s good to hear something different. Regardless, this album is what Grohl refers to as a “love letter to American music.”