Foo Fighters explain why they chose Adele’s producer for their new album

Prepare for an album of 'extremes'

Foo Fighters have discussed why they chose Adele producer Greg Kurstin to helm their new album ‘Concrete And Gold‘.

While Adele herself is rumoured to appear on the new record, the band specifically sought out her producer Kurstin, also famed for his work with likes of Sia, Tegan And Sara and many more, to take them out of both of their comfort zones.

As a result, they pushed to make an album that is “extremely heavy at times and completely the opposite with lush musical sections and crazy interludes at other times”.

Advertisement

“If you want to survive you have to kind of push a little bit,” frontman Dave Grohl told Music Week. “I just imagined the sound moving outwards. Not necessarily alternative instrumentation and shit like that, just sonically to push it out. Greg is a fucking genius. He’s a brilliant producer and he has this sonic intuition that I have never seen in anybody else.

“You’ll say ‘I feel like we need a guitar part here’, and he’ll go ‘you know the b-side to that fucking Tubular Bells record? In the second verse there’s a thing off in the left channel that sounds like birds in trees?’ He goes and makes it happen.”

Adele with Greg Kurstin at the Grammy Awards
Adele with Greg Kurstin at the Grammy Awards

Once in the studio, Grohl said that the Foos felt inspired to make an album that was as far from anything else that he’d done as possible.

“I think there was this feeling that we wanted it to be the antithesis of the albums that Greg had made,” he continued. “Knowing that he is most famous for being a polished pop producer, we got super fucking noisy right out of the gate. When we first got in there, we thought ‘let’s make them long, let’s make them noisy, let’s make them weird’.”

Grohl added: “We were experimenting with drum sounds, we were getting guitar sounds we had never gotten before. I think we were just focused on making it worlds away from anything he had done before.”

Advertisement

Grohl also revealed how they and Queens Of The Stone Age inspired one another while making their new albums, and how they planned to ‘take over the fucking world’.

Speaking to NME about the whispers of Adele appearing on ‘Concrete And Gold‘, Grohl refuses to confirm or deny the rumours just yet – but he did say that on any given day at LA’s EastWest Studios, “You might have Shania Twain having a record-release party, or the guy from Deep Purple hanging out with Jason Bonham, or Justin Timberlake would be in for a couple of weeks, or Lady Gaga working with these other cats from Nashville.”

He continued: “And every so often we’d be like, ‘Hey, wanna come sing some backing vocals?’ and they’d just f**king do it. It was loose and random: everyone was hanging out, drinking whiskey, having a good time. I never went to college, but it’s what I imagine a dormitory’s like.”

Foo Fighters release ‘Concrete And Gold’ on September 15 and will play The O2 in London on September 19.

You May Also Like

Advertisement

TRENDING

Advertisement

More Stories