Prepare yourself, citizens of The Kingdom Of Endlessly Unchanging Dad-Rock: your corny-joke-cracking, broken-legged overlord Dave Grohl may once again be on the rise. Rumors are swirling today that a major change is coming for Grohl and the Foo Fighters, spurred on by a Twitter announcement that there’s an “official band announcement” planned for tonight.
And while our experience with formally announced band meetings suggests that this might just be about drummer Taylor Hawkins not kicking in his share of the gas money, it’s also possible that the group is planning a hiatus, in advance of Grohl embarking on doing some solo work. (That’s per the New York Post’s Page Six, never ones to shy away from presenting a gossip-backed dark future, like dour, chatty Nostradami).
If the rumors are true—and we’re not just getting another album that’ll capture 50 more minutes of the endlessly repeating guitar riff that lives in the back of Dave Grohl’s head—it would be the band’s second stab at briefly breaking up in the interest of making people care when they ultimately reunite. Grohl made similar noises back in 2012, but apparently couldn’t make it stick; not long after the announcement, the group started working on his Sound City documentary, and then started recording the songs that ultimately became 2014’s Sonic Highways.
We won’t know for sure until tonight, when the band will announce the announcement that this preliminary announcement was meant to announce; it’s always possible, after all, that the group just wants to take a minute and publicly apologize for what Grohl did to “Blackbird” during the In Memoriam segment of last weekend’s Oscars broadcast.
UPDATE: Still no word about what this “official band announcement” entails from the Foo Fighters’ official Twitter account, but Consequence Of Sound has dug up an Artisan News interview Taylor Hawkins gave at the Guitar Center Drum-Off Finals in January, in which the drummer declares the band as being in “indefinite hiatus.” (Or “i-hate-us,” as the Family Circus-esque members of the group apparently call it.)
The relevant question comes in at the end of the video, right around the five-minute mark, with Hawkins saying, “Not because we don’t love each other, or don’t want to make music together… We did so much in the last five or six years—we as a band could go into the studio tomorrow and have just as much fun as we ever had, but I think that the world needs a break from us for a little while.”
UPDATE: So it turns out that this whole “official band announcement” thing was exactly as jokily pretentious as it sounded, with the Foo Fighters releasing a video tonight mocking all the rumors suggesting that they might be breaking up. (No comment on the “indefinite hiatus” thing, though.) Complete with some intentionally awful Dave Grohl solo material, and a surprisingly passable acoustic cover of “Everlong,” with emergency singer Nick Lachey on vocals, it’s a perfect example of how Grohl and his bandmates earned their reputation as “The band that everyone says is funny.”