Foo Fighters Go Back to the Start on ‘Kimmel’ With ‘This Is a Call’

Foo Fighters went back to the beginning for the latest performance in their week-long residency on Jimmy Kimmel Live. On Tuesday night, the band sprung for “This Is a Call,” the first single they released from their debut album Foo Fighters in 1995.

The first stretch of this “This Is A Call” builds up to a raging, clap-along instrumental break. Frontman Dave Grohl wrote the record in 1994 as an means of breaking away from the past and building something new. “I felt like I had nothing to lose and I didn’t necessarily wanna be the drummer of Nirvana for the rest of my life without Nirvana,” he told Kerrang in 2006. “I thought I should try something I’d never done before and I’d never stood up in front of a band and been the lead singer, which was fucking horrifying and still is.”

Foo Fighters kicked off their Kimmel residency on Monday with “Window,” a selection from their 12th and latest studio album, Your Favorite Toy, released earlier this year. “This song in particular, I remember my daughter Harper, who’s 17, she was just learning the bass, so I thought, ‘I’m gonna write a song … that she can come upstairs and put a bass line on, like really simple, and then we can jam together,’” Grohl said in an extended interview with Kimmel.

Your Favorite Toy followed 2023’s But Here We Are, the band’s first album since the death of their drummer Taylor Hawkins. In a review of the record, Rolling Stone wrote, “The band’s 12th album is the next chapter in that story of fighting through grief and looking forward. Yet where its predecessor often had a reflective tone, their latest is about high-energy garage-rock catharsis, getting in a room and blasting away and letting the noise be your guide.”