Dave Grohl has said the upcoming new Foo Fighters album won’t all sound like new single ‘Shame Shame’.

The band debuted the song on last week’s post-election episode of Saturday Night Live, and they also announced details of their 10th album, ‘Medicine At Midnight’.

Showcasing an eccentric, funk-driven side of the band, Grohl has now insisted in a new interview that it’s not a representation of the album’s sound as a whole.

“We wrote a lot of these songs to be played in stadiums — these big grooves, big choruses, big guitars,” Grohl told Spotify’s Global Head of Rock, Allison Hagendorf, on yesterday’s (November 13) Rock This podcast. “It was really sort of designed to be this big party album.”

“We had looked back on all the stuff we’d done over the last 25 years like, ‘We’ve done this noisy, punk rock stuff. We’ve done gentle, acoustic stuff. We’ve done three-and-a-half, four-minute long radio-rock, singalong singles.”

He continued: “But we’ve never done like that groove-oriented, sort of — ‘Let’s Dance'[by] David Bowie, Power Station, the Cars, [Rolling Stones‘] Tattoo You — those rock albums that would make you get up and move and dance. We haven’t done that yet, so we went into the studio with that in mind… I don’t even wanna say it’s like our ‘dance record,’ but it’s got grooves that we’ve never had before, so they kind of make you bounce around.”

Grohl said that some of the tracks the band recorded together were “instantly recognisable” as being Foo Fighters records. He then added that although ‘Shame Shame’ stood out it was more a starting point for ‘Medicine At Midnight’ as opposed to the overall direction of its sound.

“But because it’s unlike anything we’ve ever done, I thought, ‘Okay well this is a good place to start.’ This should be the first thing people hear because it’s indicative of this, sort of left turn that we’ve taken a little bit,” Grohl explained of the decision to make the song their first single from the album, which is set to be released on February 5, 2021.

Speaking to NME earlier this week, Grohl said that ‘Medicine At Midnight’ is a “party album”.

“Since it’s our 10th record and 25th anniversary, we decided years ago that we wanted to do something that sounded fresh,” he explained. “We’ve made some many different types of album, we’ve done acoustic things, we’ve done punk-rock things, mid-tempo Americana type of things. We have a lot of albums to fall back on, so you just have to go with our gut feeling and I thought instead of making some mellow adult album, I thought ‘Fuck that, let’s make a party album’.”

Asked what kind of party, he answered: “A lot of our favourite records have these big grooves and riffs. I hate to call it a funk or dance record, but it’s more energetic in a lot of ways than anything we’ve ever done and it was really designed to be that Saturday night party album. It was written and sequenced in a way that you put on, and nine songs later you’ll just put it on again. Y’know, songs like ‘Making A Fire’. To me that’s rooted in Sly & The Family Stone grooves, but amplified in the way that the Foo Fighters do it.”

Meanwhile, Grohl has revealed how the dark and sobering video for Foo Fighters‘ ‘Shame Shame’ was inspired by an unsettling dream he experienced as a teenager.