If any one band has managed to keep the institution of rock’n’roll afloat in the 21st century, it’s probably the Foo Fighters. As one of the only guitar-wielding groups this side of 2000 your grandma could recognise, Grohl and company have always been the poster children of modern rock music, an honour they’ve had to grapple with throughout their storied careers. New album ‘Your Favourite Toy’ sees the band struggling to live up to that expectation.

Where 2023’s ‘But Here We Are’ dealt directly with the passing of pivotal member Taylor Hawkins, ‘Your Favourite Toy’ is the band’s first attempt at properly moving on without him. Foo Fighters are forced to commit to a direction here, and it seems to be their most aggressive tendencies that’ve risen to the top. The group’s twelfth record aims to be loud and audacious, trading in the cool colours and simple aesthetics of previous album covers for a gritty collage style: Grohl and company aren’t exactly venturing into noise rock territory or anything, but neither are they interested in putting together their most nuanced recording. As you’d hope, it’s the album’s title track that captures this approach, rip-roaring its ways through all the “na-na-na” vocal refrains, angular blues rock riffs and cocky lyrical taunts you could reasonably stuff into a cut coming in at under three minutes. The greatest failing of ‘Your Favourite Toy,’ then, is how readily it betrays just how ill-equip the Foo Fighters are to show their teeth to the world.

It becomes abundantly clear that this band, who could reasonably be described as modern dad rock, don’t really have the get-up-and-go to make an album that truly kicks you in the nuts— both ‘Caught In The Echo’ and ‘Of All People’ are well put-together tunes (especially the former, which confidently executes on all those classic Foo Fighters tropes with a fun bluesy twist), but neither one has that much aggression or venom under the hood. Instead, Grohl and company take to the mixing board to amp up their new release, pushing the guitars up to worrying levels of volume and distortion. ‘Your Favourite Toy’ probably has some of the most unique sound design of any record in their catalogue, truth be told: that may just be because, compared to anything from ‘The Colour And The Shape’ to ‘Wasting Light’ to ‘But Here We Are,’ this album is really quite garish. No track demonstrates this better than ‘Spit Shine,’ a song you could honestly describe as ‘ugly’ without a caveat in sight— the crackling vocal distortion, atonal note choices and relentless momentum of the whole thing collide in only the most displeasing of ways.

Now, we are talking about one of rock’s longstanding mainstays here, and you can feel the Foo Fighters formula working its magic even on a weaker release like this. In an ironic twist of fate, it’s the album’s slowest material that escapes the uncomfortable production, allowing the Josh Homme-esque swagger of ‘Window’ and the genuinely quite moving ‘Unconditional’ to act as standouts across the tracklist. ‘Child Actor’ is aiming to hit similar high notes, working its “turn the cameras off” hook into the emotional core of the record— it is another track that falls victim to its own underwhelming presentation though, complete with a surprisingly run-of-the-mill vocal performance from Grohl. It should come as no surprise that ruining the main guitar tones of your rock’n’roll project won’t do it any favours, and the more standard cuts across ‘Your Favourite Toy’ fail to stack up to previous hits for that very reason. When all is said and done, only dramatic closer ‘Asking For A Friend’ manages to make its unfortunate style work.

‘But Here We Are’ felt like the most important Foo Fighters album in quite some time when it released back in 2023, like it was a record that stood tall next to the classics: ‘Your Favourite Toy’ will be best remembered as the release that came right after. Grohl and company are professionals, and they obviously know what they’re doing— there’s definitely enough rock’n’roll swagger here to get your foot tapping— but their twelfth project has neither the drive nor the passion to really see it through. In the end, this probably won’t be the favourite of many.