After a four-year break, Foo Fighters will return with their seventh full-length studio effort on April 12 (via Roswell/RCA), and on Tuesday the band finally unveiled its title, Wasting Light, and official tracklist.
The first single, “Rope,” will drop March 1 (as a digital download and a free gift to fans who pre-order the record via iTunes), and Dave Grohl has promised the LP — one of SPIN’s most anticipated albums of 2011 — will be their heaviest in years: “There’s 11 songs and front to back, there’s not one sleepy ballad,” he has said.
Wasting Light was recorded in the garage of Grohl’s home in California’s San Fernando Valley, and reunites the rock vet with his former Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic and producer Butch Vig, who helmed the grunge band’s blockbuster landmark Nevermind.
“I literally backed the minivan out of the garage, pulled the lawnmower out, put a drum set in it and set up mics,” Grohl said of the album, tracked on back-to-basics analog gear. “We soundproofed the garage door so that my neighbors wouldn’t call the fucking cops.”
“Going back to make an album with a producer you’ve worked with before is not unlike going back and fucking a girlfriend you had 20 years ago,” Grohl added about working with Vig again. “It can either be really good or a total fucking disaster. But it was perfectly natural and totally comfortable and he’s the same person he was 20 years ago. He wears cologne now. I think that’s the only difference.”
While Novoselic plays bass and accordion on “I Should Have Known,” which Grohl has called “the darkest song on the album,” Bob Mould guests on “Dear Rosemary.” The LP — mixed by Alan Moulder, who worked on Death Cab for Cutie’s just-announced release — also finds onetime Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear returning to the fold.
On Valentine’s Day, the Foos dropped a hilarious video for the super heavy alt-rock blitz “White Limo.” Watch the clip, starring a drunken Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, right here. And for another taste of the band’s return to their heavy rock roots, listen to a snippet of Wasting Light‘s opening track, “Burning Bridge,” right here.
The band filmed the recording process of their new album as part of a new documentary movie, directed by James Moll (who helmed the Oscar-winning 1998 doc The Last Days). The film, which chronicles the Foos’ 16-year-history, will premiere in March at Austin, TX’s annual South by Southwest conference.
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Wasting Light tracklist:
Bridge Burning
Rope
Dear Rosemary
White Limo
Arlandria
These Days
Back & Forth
A Matter Of Time
Miss The Misery
I Should Have Known
Walk
