FOO FIGHTERS‘ “Shame Shame” has topped Billboard‘s Mainstream Rock Songs airplay chart. The track marks the band’s ninth Mainstream Rock Songs No. 1 and first since 2017’s “The Sky Is a Neighborhood”.
“Shame Shame” is taken from FOO FIGHTERS‘ new album “Medicine At Midnight”, which will be released on February 5, 2021 via Roswell Records/RCA Records.
Regarding the track, FOO FIGHTERS frontman Dave Grohl told Kerrang!: “When we first started recording the record, we were recording songs that were recognizable as the FOO FIGHTERS. Actually, the first song that we recorded is the first song on the record: ‘Making A Fire’. And that really kind of set the tone, like, ‘Okay, this is really up and really fuckin’ big, and let’s keep moving in that direction.’
“And after a few weeks I came in with this idea, which is originally based on a simple guitar riff and this unusual rhythm which is a drum set recorded in a stairwell, but then there’s this finger-snapping and stomping and clapping loop that’s behind it,” Dave continued. “Those two things started coming together, and rather than load a lot of things on top of it, we kept it really simple: there’s an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, a bass, a vocal, and also this keyboard part.
“It was noticeably different than anything we’ve ever done, and I always think that when you’re releasing a song before an album, you want it to give a little bit of pretext for things to come; you want to present this to your audience as some sort of indication that we’re not just making the same FOO FIGHTERS record again. And there was something about it, with the vibe and the rhythm, that just seems like new territory for us.”
Earlier this month, Grohl told Planet Rock about FOO FIGHTERS‘ musical approach on “Medicine At Midnight”: “I started thinking about the direction that we should take for the next record. And I looked at our back catalog, and I thought, okay, we’ve covered a lot of territory in 25 years. We’ve made acoustic albums; we’ve made noisy rock records; we’ve made sort of midtempo singalongs. And you look back, and you can use it as reference, but you don’t necessarily wanna revisit these places that you’ve already been. And so of all the things that we’ve done, I thought the one album we haven’t made yet is sort of a groove-oriented party album. I mean, if you were to hear the rest of the record, a lot of it is rooted in these grooves that come from SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE and disco and two-step shuffle sort of thing. As a drummer, I always think about that as a foundation, because that can really create the aesthetic or the vibe of an album. So I thought, okay, a lot of our favorite rock and roll bands over the years have that one record that’s a rock and roll record that you can really dance to — whether it’s THE ROLLING STONES‘ ‘Tattoo You’ or David Bowie‘s ‘Let’s Dance’ or a POWER STATION record; things like that. I thought, ‘We haven’t really done that yet.’ A lot of our albums are really driving and sometimes kind of morose and melancholy, introspective. I was, like, ‘Fuck that! Let’s have a party. Let’s make that record where you can bounce around.'”
Photo credit: Danny Clinch
