“One night I was listening to all of these ideas and just randomly there were these 10 songs in a row… that were all just like noisy, loud bangers,” Grohl explained. Describing the sound as “uptempo, like back to the old days,” he realized in that moment: “This is the record right here.” Once the band found their direction, the recording process was a whirlwind. Grohl noted, “We just blasted everything out in like three or four weeks.”
For Grohl, the ambition behind a 12th record was about finding a “pure intention” three decades into their career. “What’s the ambition? Like what are we?” he asked. “Whatever’s going to make us jump around and smile and scream… that’s the purest intention. We hit this little vein of gold and were like, that’s the feeling, that’s the vibe, that’s the energy.”
The conversation also turned to the enduring presence of the late Taylor Hawkins. “We had Taylor Hawkins as our drummer for 25 years and, beyond being an amazing drummer, he was this incredible spirit,” Grohl told The Zane Lowe Show. He admitted that “continuing on after Taylor was really complicated,” describing his late bandmate as “our brother” and “our best friend.”
Speaking on what would have been Hawkins’ birthday, Grohl reflected on the drummer’s lasting impact on the group’s brotherhood and sound. “We wake up in the morning and everybody just texts about how much we miss him,” he said. Despite the loss, his spirit remains a driving force: “In everything we do we want to have that energy—we want to have that energy for Taylor.”
