Foo Fighters - New Album '‘Concrete And Gold’ Set For Release Sept 15th
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PHOTO: Brantley Gutierrez
Dave Grohl describes the mission statement made manifest in Foo Fighters’ ninth epic “I wanted it to be the biggest sounding Foo Fighters record ever. To make a gigantic rock record but with Greg Kurstin’s sense of melody and arrangement… Motorhead’s version of Sgt. Pepper… or something like that.”
'Concrete and Gold' marries some of the most insanely heavy Foo Fighters riffs ever with lush harmonic complexities courtesy of a first time team-up with producer Greg Kurstin.
The unlikely alliance with Greg 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.”
Some months later, Grohl would randomly spot and fanboy out over “the guy from The Bird & The Bee!”. The two became fast friends over common musical loves with Grohl learning that his new favourite band had been on hiatus due to Kurstin’s workload as a producer.
While Foo Fighters recorded and released Sonic Highways, broke some bones and packed stadiums and arenas on one of the top five grossing tours of 2015, and gifted fans with the St. Cecilia EP, "Greg was becoming one of the biggest producers in the world,” Grohl recalls.
With the writing and recording of the next Foo Fighters album on the horizon, Grohl was eager as always to find fresh challenges for the band: “So 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.”
Darrel Thorp was soon enlisted to mix and engineer. This collective conceived a blueprint of the new record, secretly booking into Hollywood’s esteemed EastWest studios to consummate this marriage of extremes... or as Grohl puts it: “Our noise and Greg’s big brain and all of his sophisticated arrangements and composition.”