After an agonising wait for new Foo Fighters music, we finally got a new single in the form of the surprisingly funky ‘Shame Shame’.
We got a lot of teasing over the last week or so for what appears to be a new Foo Fighters album and we can finally confirm the news: yes, they have a new album coming called Medicine At Midnight and the first single off it is called ‘Shame Shame’.
‘Shame Shame’ is perhaps unlike any Foo Fighters single we’ve heard either as the band really go hard on the groove and funk with this new banger. Think of a poppy dance track but done with the Foo Fighters’ guitar-heavy aesthetic.
Since this was a new musical direction for the band, we had a chat with Chris Shiflett and Nate Mendel to unpack what they were going for this time around. And as with most Foo Fighters songs, it all begins with Dave Grohl.
“[‘Shame Shame’] kind of stands out on the record, it’s definitely a little different than anything we’ve ever done before and it’s a little bit different than anything else on the record, although the record has a lot of songs that are, you know, groove-based like this one is,” says Chris.
“Dave’s a drummer so he’s always coming up with rhythmic twists and riffs based on rhythms that he hears in his head.”
The lyrics reference feelings of shame and the music video, which will be released soon, is something we haven’t really seen from the Foos before. So I just had to ask, were the band feeling shameful when writing ‘Shame Shame’?
“That’s a great question to ask Dave!” laughs Chris. “He wrote the lyrics, I don’t really know what he’s referencing so I should ask him!”
Ambiguous lyrics aside, the band went through a number of wildly different versions of ‘Shame Shame’ before settling on the final one we got. In fact, Nate says he originally wasn’t even supposed to play on the song.
“For ‘Shame Shame’, it started of as just a bunch of clicks from Dave [clicks fingers], almost like flamenco, and it just grew out of that,” recalls Nate. “There wasn’t going to be any bass line originally, like, it just felt like it needed keyboards and I was fine with that.”
“I like the idea that you don’t need an electric bass on every single fucking song, and I ended up playing on it just to give it extra character on top of what was already there like a bit of extra added texture. So that was the plan, just to throw out the rule book.”
There was a lot of talk about how Medicine At Midnight would contain a riff Dave has been working on for 25 years. So did we hear it on ‘Shame Shame’?
“Nope but it’s in there [on the record]!” laughs Nate.
Stay tuned for more Foo Fighters coverage because we got a lot more from Chris and Nate about the Medicine At Midnight, dealing with COVID and lockdown, looking back on the Foo Fighters’ long career, and that 25-year-old riff coming very soon.
