The Foo Fighters find purpose in tragedy, Lola Young is a rare talent – the week’s best albums
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Foo Fighters, But Here We Are ★★★★★
“I had a version of home and just like that, I was left to live without it,” sings Dave Grohl, with affecting understatement. “I had a person I loved and just like that, I was left to live without him.” The song is The Glass, the centrepiece of the Foo Fighters’ upcoming 11th album, But Here We Are.
It marks the superpowered American rock band’s return to the studio following the sudden death of Grohl’s closest friend, fellow drummer and bandmate Taylor Hawkins, aged 50, in March last year, but also the death of Grohl’s mother, Virginia, aged 84, in August the same year. Unsurprisingly, loss and grief lie at the core of the Foo Fighters’ most succinct and intense album.
It is worth noting that the Foos were born of loss and grief, when the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in 1994 forced their powerhouse drummer out from the backline, to record a debut album of his own songs, in which he played all the instruments. But that wasn’t a particularly downbeat offering and as Grohl’s band grew in number (there are currently six Foo members) and ascended to stadium-conquering status, they have rarely come across as particularly deep.
As a guitar playing, raw-voiced, charismatic frontman, Grohl has fashioned something in his gregarious image, in which a huge span of classic rock and pop elements (where Black Sabbath meets Queen and Hüsker Dü dance with Bon Jovi) are smashed together with the anthemic bravado of a heavy rock showband. Foo Fighters have been lots of fun over the years, but it has taken tragedy to push them towards something more vital. Lyrically, But Here We Are may not be particularly profound – projecting loss rather than investigating it – but it is sincere.
Grohl is back behind the kit for this one, thrashing his drums on opening track Rescued with a physical vigour that threatens to turn into a stampede. Guitars howl at full power, whilst Grohl’s vocal is a screaming roar: “It came in a flash / It came out of nowhere / It happened so fast / And then it was over.”
But rather than plunge into unadulterated metal pain, the song shifts gear for a surprising singalong chorus: “We’re all just waiting to be rescued.” Even in despair, Grohl has forsaken none of his artful ability to piece different elements of music together, a songwriting style which perhaps owes something to thinking simultaneously from the points of view of rhythm section and topline melody.
Show Me How offers pillows of soft rock harmonies for Grohl to mournfully duet with his teenage daughter, Violet, over a grungy groove that calls to mind Soundgarden at their most sombre. The fragile Rest is as broken up as a Sparklehorse lullaby until the band kick in with such force that I nearly jumped out of my seat the first time I heard it. Most rewarding of all is the 10-minute long The Teacher, replete with multi-part riffs and tempo changes that call to mind Paul McCartney and Wings at their most epic, albeit with John Bonham’s ghost smashing through the soft rock contours, and John Lennon unleashing primal scream therapy on vocals.
The death of loved ones may never have sounded so … I’m not going to say uplifting but uproarious, maybe, imbued with a hard-rocking spirit that pushes right through bewilderment and sadness until it comes out the other side, defiantly alive. Out June 2. Neil McCormick
Arlo Parks, My Soft Machine ★★★☆☆
The ‘voice of a generation’ tag has followed Arlo Parks around since she released debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams in 2021. It landed the then-20 year old the Mercury Prize and the Best New Artist award at that year’s Brits. She’s not your average critical darling: her music is muted and soft, made up of poetic musings on relationships, growing up in a divided world and the heavy, incapacitating weight of mental illness, coupled with the barest whispers of a beat.
Parks (real name Anaïs Oluwatoyin Estelle Marinho) has now returned with My Soft Machine, a sun-drenched but characteristically reflective record that sees her attempting to reckon with her newfound fame. Opener Bruiseless is a fleeting, minute-long wish for childhood innocence, when she or her loved ones weren’t scarred by experience (“Almost everyone that I love has been abused and I am included / I feel so much guilt that I couldn’t guard more people from harm”). As with her debut, it’s a spoken word introduction to her world. Two years ago, in her native west London, she dreamed of domestic bliss – “I see myself ablaze with joy / Sleepy-eyed / Feeding your cat or slicing artichoke hearts”. Now, she sings, she’s found it in California (where she lives with girlfriend and fellow musician Ashnikko): “The person I love is patient with me / She’s feeding me cheese and I’m happy”.
Her wide-ranging influences – Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Radiohead and Portishead, R&B pioneer Frank Ocean – are evident in the genre-bending, courageous depth of her lyrics. Impurities possesses the swaying tempo of Ocean’s Pink Matter; Dog Rose opens with an unmistakable 90s beat that wouldn’t feel out of place on any shoegaze or alternative record.
There are a handful of standouts, including Devotion, a powerful, guitar-revved warning about falling in love too hard and too fast that owes an obvious debt to bands like the Smashing Pumpkins. Weightless is most reminiscent of the summer anthems that populated Collapsed in Sunbeams, centred on the search for inner peace and clarity – we’re told she’s confused, cowered, lesser. It’s a song that showcases Parks at her very best.
On Pegasus, the perpetually in demand indie singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers comes on board for a candid ballad about picking up the pieces after heartbreak. The track, although anchored by Parks’s sumptuous, vulnerable vocals, is another disappointing example of the current trend for recording artists to sell singles as collaborations without much actual collaboration (Taylor Swift recently annoyed fans so much with Snow on the Beach, a ‘duet’ with Lana Del Rey – which wasn’t a duet at all – that she’s now rereleasing a different version of the song). Here, Bridgers’s vocals are barely audible, an accessory to the main event, with no individual verse of her own.
On the whole, My Soft Machine lacks the clarity of Parks’s exceptional debut, and can veer too often into repetition; there’s a lack of journey in the individual songs, meaning you end in much the same place as you started. Her lyrics are, as ever, expertly crafted, but they deserve much more musical supporting oomph. Poppie Platt
Lola Young, My Mind Wanders and Sometimes Leaves Completely ★★★★★
The noughties and 2010s saw Adele, Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen represent London-girl cool on the world stage with (respectively) their heart-aching ballads, soulful swagger and cheeky pop. But who’s to take up the mantle in this new decade? As a 2022 Brit Rising Star nominee and graduate of the Brit School, 22-year-old Lola Young has the backing of some key players – not least her managers, Nick Shymansky, who previously managed Winehouse, and Nick Huggett, who originally signed Adele.
Now, Young is releasing her new project, a deeply human, R&B-hued pop confessional that proves she’s got both the lyrical and jaw-dropping vocal gravitas to cement herself as a rare and frisson-inducing talent, one that speaks not just to her peers but cuts across generations.
Sonically, the palate is pared back with soft synths and rhythmic kick drums, but it possesses a powerful gravitational pull. Young’s smooth flow and caustic wit take the spotlight as she muses about losing her innocence and grasps at hopeful glimmers of her future, colouring pictures with specific details like the exact time of day her lover calls (12 o’clock on a Friday) and the car in which he drives away (a black cab). It all leads to the climax, a show-stopping track called What Is It About Me: performing emotional seppuku, she belts guttural, ugly-beautiful cries as she questions everything.
Acing the south London look in her Adidas track jacket and oversize thick gold hoops, Young has taken to social media to promote the new record, racking up as many as 15 million TikTok views on a single video. And while she’s hardly the first buzzy young thing to leverage the platform, Young is no flash in the pan. Her songs may be about growing pains, but they’ve got timeless appeal. LA Robinson
