Every Foo Fighters album ranked: From worst to best

In his now quintessential interview on the YouTube show Hot Ones, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl pontificated on what makes his band great. “I like to hear imperfection,” he proclaimed. “I like to hear an album where you can hear a hand going up and down the strings. That’s the human element of music. There’s rigid mechanical music that I fucking love, but I think we’re kind of best when it sounds like us, and it’s raw.” 

The birth of Grohl’s post-Nirvana passion project was as raw as it gets. He threw himself into the studio for five days in 1994, riddled with sadness following the death of Kurt Cobain, and made almost the entirety of Foo Fighters’ self-titled debut album himself. He titled the project Foo Fighters after a World War II term for UFOs and thrust it out into the world. Soon enough, he would be putting a band together and hitting the road off the strength of its reception. One of the most prominent modern bands is a result of a grieving guy, taking it all out on the instruments inside Robert Lang Studios in Shoreline, Washington.

Read more: Every Linkin Park album ranked

Many albums later, they are enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and with as many Grammys as they have bodies of work. But most importantly, they have never fully crossed over into a sound that leaves that beautiful messiness behind. We took upon the hefty task of ranking all of Foo Fighters’ albums from least good to best to explore how much they’ve elevated rock by grounding it in themselves. Long live Taylor Hawkins.

Every Foo Fighters album ranked

RCA

12. Dream Widow (2022)

Foo Fighters made a metal album. It’s them, but it’s also kind of not them. It’s them posing as a fictional metal band in a horror film made by them. It sounds exactly as you would expect it to on paper: chaotic. It proves that the Foo Fighters can stretch themselves, but the album is most successful when it leans more away from metal and into their signature sound, like on tracks such as “The Sweet Abyss.” We were all happy to hear Foo take a sharp left turn for the sake of complimenting other art, but they are too good at being who they are for a project like this to compete with their best.

Roswell Records/RCA

11. Concrete and Gold (2017)

Coming off Grohl’s 2014 HBO documentary Sonic Highways, the band got back in the lab for another full-length. The album feels like it loves leaning into jamming more than usual. Their more succinct structures were sacrificed for indulgence that took a bit away from their classic quality. Some interesting new sound experimentations took the band to a more polished studio expression and made them lose some of the rawness that is at their core. All of this said, there are moments where this exploration created some real gems. The build into the hook and release on “Arrows” display Foo at their most pleasantly emo. If this energy had been more of the full album, who knows what we could’ve gotten?

Roswell Records/RCA

10. There Is Nothing Left to Lose (1999)

This album is all about tension and release. There was alleged rigidity between Dave Grohl and co-writer/bandmate Franz Stahl during the songwriting process. This resulted in songs that do feel a bit too tightly wound for stretches; but then there are also moments of pure ecstasy, which balance the project. The most popular single from the album “Learn To Fly” is surely one of those grandiose moments. In the hook, when Grohl croons about “looking for a sign of life,” you can tell that he’s finding his groove within the open guitar strums and blasting drum sequences. The softer “Next Year” also provides a cool moment of clarity. The meditative nature of the instrumentation and floating vocals feels like a full exhale. 

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9. Medicine at Midnight (2021)

Grohl and the crew dove into some of the funk and disco rhythms that inspired some of his drum playing in Nirvana on their 10th full-length album. On paper, it doesn’t seem like it would work as well as it actually does. While this will never be considered one of Foo’s seminal projects, it does hold a special place in their overarching legacy. There’s a beautiful looseness in exploring new sonic colors that just makes the album feel fun. The stilted rhythm on “Shame Shame” is pleasantly bubbly juxtaposing against the emotion of the title. The Inara George backing vocals on “Cloudspotter” are a coyly sleek complement to Grohl’s ruggedness. Then to really solidify the offering, the bassline on the title track inspires a Zoolander face and a funky two-step.

Roswell Records/RCA

8. In Your Honor (2005)

One big experiment before it all really came together for Foo Fighters is this heavily Dave Grohl-led double album. The first half presents Grohl’s vocals at their most rage-filled in Foo’s catalog. Even on the supposed love song “Best of You,” where he’s pleading with someone he cares for to tell him if there’s someone else, Grohl does so with strained intensity, not tenderness. That said, the semi-controlled chaos makes the song one of the band’s all-time greats. The second side of the double album is a seismic shift in tone. Grohl goes full acoustic in what feels like a shift from anger to sadness. There is a quite beautiful grasp of this side of the band’s potential here. As Grohl sings, “I’d have to lose everything just to find you,” on “What If I Do?,” there seems to be a revelation of yearning. This energy would carry into the next album in a more tactful way to even more successful levels. 

Roswell Records/RCA

7. Sonic Highways (2014)

This is as close to a concept album as Foo Fighters have ever executed, as it’s aligned with a concept-filled documentary. Their shortest body of work packs a lot of punch, with each track working as an homage to different regional rock sounds that follow the group's travels. It does an excellent job of maintaining Foo’s identity throughout, especially on tracks like “The Feast and the Famine” and “Outside.” Grohl wrote the lyrics based on interview quotes from legends like Buddy Guy and Dr. John, which provided him with introspective dips and weaves. Living within these established rules seemed to have the biggest effect on the band’s bridges, which are highlighted and defined more here than almost any other album.

Roswell Records/RCA

6. But Here We Are (2023)

Foo Fighters’ latest album reaches back to the beginning. Their first-ever album was birthed from Dave Grohl processing the sudden and tragic death of Kurt Cobain. Now with the loss of their beloved longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins, Foo have produced a record centered on heartbreak, healing, rage, and melancholy. It mirrors the condensed expression of their self-titled debut, with an added element of sonic actualization rather than uninhibited fury. Listeners get taken through a fluid mourning process that goes back and forth, from intimate to explosive. That’s most prevalent on “Hearing Voices,” which is as sadly reflective as it is presently angry and confused. Yet, maybe the album’s best song still feels way more part of a whole than a standalone. While the vigor of their first album will always have a certain potency elevating it higher on this list, this homage to Hawkins feels like a breath of grunge-filled fresh air.

Roswell Records/Capitol

5. The Colour and The Shape (1997)

Some of the band’s highest musical moments exist here, even while elements of the album feel disjointed. It features one of the most memorable rock songs of the '90s, “Everlong,” the standout single dedicated to everyday figures of significance “My Hero,” and even the playful duo of back-to-back grunge-filled stank face slaps in “Monkey Wrench” and “Hey, Johnny Park!” are front and center. Nevertheless, due to another one of the band’s discombobulated transitional phases, there are a few three song stretches that don’t hold as much glue as would exist in following records. Still, a Foo Fighters festival set would be incomplete if this album hadn’t been executed. The peak moments outweigh the dips.

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4. One by One (2002)

There are some initial moments of true sonic catharsis here. After some touring and recording with Queens of the Stone Age, you can hear Grohl and the rest of the guys seeing how they can intertwine what they already had with their tone a bit. The result is some songs of epic translucence. Opener “All My Life,” for the first time in their catalog, balanced darker grunge forward pulses with that open field feeling guitar and vocals, presenting Foo at their most pure. Surely, like the few albums before it, there are still moments that feel a bit lost — and it's been reported that much of the recording process was a bit all over the place. However, it is impossible not to listen back and see the real glimmers of light strewn throughout the project giving really positive signs of things to come when the band would fully gel. 

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3. Wasting Light (2011)

A kaleidoscope of Foo's faces in different colors laces the cover of the band’s seventh studio album. This could easily be their most underrated project. The opening three tracks hit you like a crashing wave of sound fueled by a high tide of tightly sequenced guitars, drums, and some of their best attempts at vocal layering. “Dear Rosemary,” specifically, is an underappreciated top track from the, at this point, cemented band. As Grohl croons, “Truth ain't gonna change the way you lie,” and it propels into a diving scale of guitar strums into the ether, it shows you just how much Foo had figured out how to capture a core feeling. This specificity carries all the way to the closing track “Walk,” which is one of their most pure sentimental ballads.

Roswell Records

2. Foo Fighters (1995)

This album is all Dave Grohl. One that he humbly describes as an “experiment” is a debut for the ages. On the heels of exponential grief due to the passing of Kurt Cobain, Grohl wrote and recorded almost every single part of the album, except for the guitar on “X-Static” by Greg Dulli. Still, more than any other Foo Fighters album, this one feels like the purest release. A combustion of anger, hurt, and confusion blended with a hard-nosed musical perspective that Grohl always wanted to liberate. A sonic excavation and extraction that turned into a mission statement. While other bodies of work seem defined by standout songs, this one is still immortalized by its overarching feeling as a whole.

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1. Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace (2007)

“We shed some of the fear of incorpo­rating mellower stuff with the heavy stuff, so the songs on this album are very dynamic songs. And this is definitely the most pristine record we've made in a long time," Taylor Hawkins told Drum! Magazine about the making of this record in December 2007.

This album is the epiphany and the culmination. It could be said that this is when the Foo Fighters officially turned from Dave Grohl’s post-Nirvana work-in-progress into a fully realized entity, a tribe, and one of the best bands in the world. Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is a collage of all that makes them the best version of themselves. “The Pretender” as the lead single shows that they can make a rock song sound like how a heart monitor looks. “Let It Die” and “Come Alive” show that they can apply narrative-level story structure to soundscapes full of creeping crescendos that eventually explode. “Stranger Things Have Happened” is their best acoustic song because it is as present as it is reflective, and as heart-centered as it is profound. Hawkins above describes the album as the band reaching its ultimate equilibrium — and the result is an opus.