Following the overwhelmingly massive reception to the MTV Video Music Award-nominated, Mainstream Rock No. 1 track “Run,” Foo Fighters have delivered a second consecutive contender for rock anthem of 2017 in the form of “The Sky Is A Neighborhood.” The song appears on the group’s upcoming Concrete And Gold album due September 15th via Roswell Records/RCA Records.
Frontman Dave Grohl describes the song as “the biggest thing sonically that we’ve ever done” as it has a White Stripes raw and gritty sound that is sure to make it a hit among Millennials.
“One night I was lying out looking up at stars,” Grohl recalls. “Just imagining all of these stars as places that have life on them as well, and I decided that the sky is a neighborhood, that we need to keep our shit together in order to survive in this universe full of life. But I had no music yet. I just had the title. So everyday I would walk around, kind of humming this thing in my head.”
The melody of the song came to Grohl without even touching a guitar, so it follows that “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” would come just as naturally to the band: the song was recorded in a single afternoon by Grohl and fellow Foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett, Pat Smear and Rami Jaffee.
“And once we were finished,” Grohl says. “I thought ‘Okay, now we have an album. This is it and we’re done’… as we were mixing, I realized that we’d actually done what we set out do: to make this gigantic Foo Fighters record but with Greg Kurstin’s sense of jazz and melody and arrangement, something that we’d never done before.”
Of course “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” deserved an equally ambitious visual representation, and together with director of photography Brandon Trost and with production by Therapy Studios, director Grohl, Foo Fighters—and family—have more than delivered: “The Sky Is A Neighborhood” is a kaleidoscopic sci-fi mini-epic as massive as the slow burning rock anthem that gave it life. Hypnotic swirls of color of extraterrestrial origin, glowing eyes, levitating children and more combine to create an otherworldly cinematic palette equal parts beautiful and creepy—the result being arguably the most striking video in the Foo Fighters’ multiple award-winning canon.
Simultaneously, Foo Fighters are launching a constellation viewer, enabling every fan to transform to their phone into a tool for exploring the sky in their neighborhood. Fans can visit this site from their phone to configure a realistic constellation map in the viewer’s 3D sphere, then let it identify the constellations in their night sky—all while tiny Foo Fighters soundtrack their explorations at the bottom of the screen.
Concrete And Gold is the group’s ninth studio album. It was written and performed by Foo Fighters, produced by Greg Kurstin and Foo Fighters, and mixed by Darrell Thorp.
Foo Fighters play their largest-ever one day headlining performance at Cal Jam 17 at Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino, CA on Saturday, October 7th. This daylong marathon of eating, drinking and rocking also features Queens of the Stone Age, Cage The Elephant, Liam Gallagher, The Kills, Royal Blood, Japandroids, Wolf Alice, Bob Mould, The Struts, Bully, Circa Waves, Babes in Toyland, Adia Victoria, Fireball Ministry, The Obsessed, Pinky Pinky, Starcrawler, White Reaper. Tickets available at caljamfest.com.
