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Everything you need to know about the new Foo Fighters album


New York - Foo Fighters announced on Tuesday a new album and a one-day festival as the alternative rock titans promised their heaviest sound yet.

Weeks after releasing a hard-hitting single, Foo Fighters said that their ninth studio album, Concrete and Gold, would come out on 15 September.

Dave Grohl's band, which had appeared to be lying low earlier this year, said it had quietly spent six months working on the album with Greg Kurstin, the producer best known for co-writing Adele's smash hit Hello.

The group made clear it was not moving toward Adele's ballad style. The band called it "our biggest sounding album ever".

The album "will undoubtedly fry stereos from here to Fukuoka. Start saving your speaker money now. Sorry. It's big," said a handwritten note posted on its website.

Concrete and Gold has "more twists and turns than a live Senate hearing," it said.

On their partnership with Greg Kurstin

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."

Some months later, Grohl would randomly spot and fanboy out over "the guy from The Bird & The Bee!" aka Greg Kurstin. 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 (Beck, Radiohead) was soon enlisted to mix and engineer. This collective conceived a blueprint of the new record as "Motorhead’s version of Sgt. Pepper... or something like that," 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."

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 and throw the ultimate "backyard party for 50 000 people … "

Cal Jam 17

What came to Grohl in that vision will become reality on 7 October 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 US headline, in the spirit of the original California Jam, this daylong marathon of eating, drinking and rocking features an absolutely unfuckwithable line-up: Queens of the Stone Age, Cage The Elephant, Liam Gallagher, The Kills, Royal Blood, Japandroids, Wolf Alice, Bob Mould, The Struts, Bully, Circa Waves, Babes in Toyland, Adia Victoria, Fireball Ministry, The Obsessed, Pinky Pinky, Starcrawler and White Reaper. 

And in addition to 12 hours of rock and roll good times, Cal Jam 17 offers camping, carnival rides, a water park, attractions, a mobile recording studio & so much more. On Friday night, 6 October, campers will also experience the world’s best Go-Go band Big Tony & Trouble Funk, an outdoor movie theatre and many other surprises. Camping space is limited, so act fast.

For more information, visit Caljamfest.com.

Cal Jam 17 will be the first chance for Foo Fighters fans in the US to experience the sonic majesty of songs from Concrete and Gold in their full live glory—and will be followed by a full scale October through December US headline tour. Public on sales for all dates will be from 29 June at 10:00 local time. 

For information on how to sign up for pre-sale access visit https://www.foofighters.com/.

The track list

The full track listing for Concrete and Gold is:

1. T-Shirt
2. Run
3. Make It Right
4. The Sky Is A Neighborhood
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

Foo Fighters, born from the ashes of Nirvana in 1994, have frequently hinted and dispelled speculation of retirement.

The band earlier this month released a first song from the album, Run, a shift back to the intense, whirling guitars of Nirvana in which the 48-year-old Grohl was the drummer.

Run was accompanied by a video directed by Grohl in which residents of a retirement home erupt into a raucous party when Foo Fighters come as their evening entertainment.

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