For Foo Fighters, their favourite toy also happens to be the most used. It is not as though the Dave Grohl-fronted band has changed all that much about their style over their twenty-five-year history. Your Favourite Toy is, according to Grohl, a chance for the band to explore a new sound. They have explored this before, on almost every album. Hardly the time to switch things up, but at some point, there needs to be some movement in a new instrumental direction. Punk is the subgenre selected, and it gives the band little in the way of fresh inspiration. The tired dad rock of the times is to be slogged through again, and as Grohl reforms the band to make a sound that pales in comparison to earlier works, it’s heartbreaking to think what could have come from a So Here We Are follow-up. Foo Fighters’ best work to date is brushed aside as an accident, a stop-off for grief before Grohl and co. pick up their unconvincing punk spirit.
Mercifully short, but still ten filler songs to present the band as this faux, urgent punk outfit. They heard Frank Carter was fronting a Sex Pistols reunion and thought it better to coast on nostalgia than create a fitting continuation of a powerful, grief-stricken album. Your Favourite Toy has its moments, but they all suffer from the punk crunch. Even at their worst, Foo Fighters have never found themselves to be an unconvincing outfit, but here they are, struggling to figure out where to head next. Turmoil explodes across Your Favourite Toy. Not one song sounds at all pushing boundaries. They’re all composed to fit in with the hits; to pad out the set so Grohl and the band can shuffle out the songs they’re less fond of after so many years on the road. From the first song Caught in the Echo to the final track Asking for a Friend, there is a sense of never quite moving on from the sound they have captured and milked dry.
Those singles filled with patchy punk promise are nowhere to be found on the album. Easy-going rock that will hardly alienate or alleviate anyone listening. Just radio rock and that is what Foo Fighters has always served. It got stale a decade ago but the messages, themes, and instrumental route through these songs has hardly ever, if ever, changed for the band. Window is passable not because of anything it does but because it’s the first non-single to come. You could replace it with any other song on the album in its spot and it’d fare just as well, as these tracks all sound identical. Underwhelming “na na na” chants as the band brings the instrumental crunch on the title track remains an unconvincing moment, but it serves the purpose Grohl had found with this release.
It’s hard to feel that this one is at all a genuine effort from Grohl and the band. They were so open and vulnerable on So Here We Are. To close that door, barricade it from one side, and present as a fun group with no thoughts beyond the wills and wont’s of typically heightened romance and rock aesthetics feels inauthentic. They do not need to make some massive proclamation, but truth is beauty and Your Favourite Toy sounds rather ugly. An implication of feeling is not the same as actually feeling. Your Favourite Toy is a great switch off your brain album, but it’s hard to do so when you clock a cliché every other line. Chips on shoulders, favouritism as a scapegoat, it’s all just noise. But that is what Foo Fighters has offered consistently. Better elsewhere, but noise all the same. Their claim of better days on Unconditional is a line they have fed us before, and listeners are right to lose patience with the band’s claim, since it’s getting worse to hear from Foo Fighters.
