Music News | New Foo Fighters Album | 'Concrete and Gold'

image via RCA Records

What the actual hell you guys?! 

Well this came out of left field. I knew the boys had something up their sleeves with the release of ‘Run’ earlier this month, but certainly not the announcement of a new album in 3 months. 3 months! Not only that, but a US tour (hopefully a UK tour will follow) and an epic Foo family barbecue blow-out named ‘Cal Jam 17’ are on the horizon; think of Cal Jam 17 as a mini-Glastonbury in the faraway lands of California. In the press release attached to the new record (God, we haven’t even got to that yet), it is stated that:

“Months, sounds and stories (more on those soon, promise) and so many guitars later, the 11-Grammy-winning, 25+ million-record-selling, last great American stadium rock band had completed its most ambitious album ever – which naturally begat another insane challenge: How to celebrate music & throw the ultimate ‘backyard party for 50,000 people’ …

“What came to Grohl in that vision will soon become reality October 7 when Foo Fighters’ CAL JAM 17 takes over Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino, CA. In addition to being Foo Fighters’ biggest ever one-day U.S. headline, in the spirit of the original California Jam, this daylong marathon of eating, drinking and rocking features an absolutely unfuckwithable lineup [kill me]: Queens of the Stone Age, Cage the Elephant, Liam Gallagher, The Kills, Royal Blood, Japandriods, Wolf Alice, Bob Mould, The Struts, Bully, Circa Waves, Babes in Toyland, Adia Victoria, Fireball Ministry, The Obsessed, Pinky Pinky, Starcrawler, White Reaper … And in addition to 12 hours of rock and roll and good times, Cal Jam 17 offers camping, carnival rides, a water park, attractions, a mobile recording studio & so much more.”

Back to the record itself (I know, I still can’t believe this either), Concrete and Gold will be released September 15 worldwide via Roswell Records / RCA Records this year. If you’re in America and pre-order the record now, you can also get yourself on the list for pre-sale tickets for the upcoming tour this fall. This is a similar process to Queens of the Stone Age’s announcement of Villains last week, alongside their world tour.

Described as ‘hard rock extremes and pop sensibilities collide on ninth opus’ in RCA’s press release, Concrete and Gold is set to be one of the loudest – and most intriguing – Foo Fighters records to date. With the recent conformation of long-time touring keyboardist Rami Jaffee becoming an official sixth member of the band (it’s about time!), the record was exciting enough. That was before I discovered the choice of producer. RCA describe Dave’s infatuation with a certain band, which would eventually lead to the ‘unlikely alliance’ of the band and producer Greg Kurstin:

“Concrete and Gold marries some of the most insanely heavy FF riffs ever with lush harmonic complexities courtesy of a first-time team-up with producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia, Pink).

“This unlikely alliance came about through a bizarre sequence of surprise musical obsessions and chance encounters: Listening to the radio during a drive roughly four years ago, Grohl first heard ‘Again and Again’ by Kurstin’s band The Bird & The Bee – ‘It blew my mind … it was so much more sophisticated than anything I’d ever heard and I became obsessed.’”

You can already hear the amalgamation of Foo Fighters’ raw energy and Kurstins’ melodic, more pop orientated sounds in the first single ‘Run’. This combination is blatantly Foo Fighters’, but there is something different festering beneath the layers upon layers of distortion. As Grohl states in the PR, “... I think maybe Greg is the guy that we ask to be our producer because he’s never made a heavy rock record before and we’ve never worked with a pop producer,” describing the collaboration as “Motorhead’s version of Sgt. Pepper.”

Not only did we get the announcement and information surrounding Concrete and Gold, but we also got the tracklist (‘Run’, ‘La Dee Da’ and ‘The Sky Is A Neighborhood’ have already been heard):

(1) T-Shirt

(2) Run

(3) Make It Right

(4) The Sky Is A Neighbourhood

(5) La Dee Da

(6) Dirty Water

(7) Arrows

(8) Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)

(9) Sunday Rain

(10) The Line

(11) Concrete and Gold

Produced by Kurstin and Foo Fighters, written and performed by the Foos and mixed by Darrell Throp, Concrete and Gold is going to be one of the biggest records of this year; when isn’t a Foo Fighters record one of the biggest releases of the year … at least for me, anyway. 

All information regarding the record can be found on Foo Fighters website and their artist page on RCA.