Medicine at Midnight

“I guarantee that most musicians have that groove or that vibe somewhere within them,” Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl tells Apple Music of the funk and disco rhythms that course through his band’s 10th LP. “They just may have never found the right time or place to let it out.” Recorded before the global pandemic took hold in early 2020, <i>Medicine At Midnight</i> is very much the sound of Grohl letting it out—a round of fleet-footed party rock inspired, in part, by ABBA, Prince, and David Bowie’s <i>Let’s Dance</i>, the 1983 Nile Rodgers-produced classic whose drummer, Omar Hakim, contributes percussion on several tracks here. Without breaking entirely from their highly reliable brand of stadium-ready slow burns (“Waiting on a War”) and riffy joyrides (“Love Dies Young”), the Foos make space for cowbell (“Cloudspotter”) and calls from the dance floor (the soulful title cut), handclaps and <i>na-na-na</i>s (“Making a Fire”). It’s a change that should probably come as no surprise. “I’m a drummer,” Grohl says. “I explained one time to Pharrell: ‘If you listen to <i>Nevermind</i>, those are disco beats, dude.’ If you’ve been in a band for a long time, you get comfortable in that place that people are familiar with. In some sort of attempt at longevity, you just have to be able to reach out and try things you’ve never done before.”