Releases Album

Sonic Highways

Eighth album, eight tracks, eight cities, eight studios, one week in each stop, writing and recording on the fly whilst also producing a documentary episode on each city. Sounds like a job for Foo Fighters.

After pre-production in Autumn 2013 to lock down instrumentation, the band began work on “Sonic Highways” in the first half of 2014, collaborating again with Butch Vig as production jumped from coast to coast. Some visits, such as Washington, D.C. and Seattle, had personal significance to the band and their formative years; others like New Orleans had captured their imagination as they’d passed through on tours past and stood out for their rich musical history. It was also in NOLA where they broke with convention, ignoring a number of traditional recording studios in the city and setting up shop in the world-famous Preservation Hall. The band brought along Rami Jaffee once more, his last collaborative work before being an officially initiated Foo Fighter.

Along the way, musicians from each city lent their talent to the album: Rick Nielsen, Pete Stahl, Skeeter Thompson, Zac Brown, Gary Clark Jr., Joe Walsh, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Benjamin Gibbard, Kristeen Young, and the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra.

“Sonic Highways” was a love letter to these places and people whose gifts and wisdoms were generously given to Foo Fighters during the recording process. Drawing inspiration from the sights, sounds, and stories of each location, the finished tracks spun the tales from the road into vignettes of a shared human experience.

“Sonic Highways” was released on November 10, 2014 and debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart, appearing in Top Ten charts nineteen times worldwide. The lead single, ‘Something From Nothing’, was honoured with a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance.