Foo Fighters fly on autopilot throughout Your Favorite Toy

After all, this is just another Foo Fighters album. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s the second-leanest record in their catalog, clocking in at a hair over 36 minutes. But that brevity doesn’t approximate a laser-edged focus so much as a lack of novelty. These are ten songs whose ultimate design is to act as filler between “My Hero,” “The Pretender,” “All My Life,” and the band’s other tried-and-true hits. That said, this new music is never offensively bad, but it’s far from convincingly inspired. It’s paint-by-numbers Foo Fighters that you can expect to hear while you wait for “Everlong” at the end of the night, a reminder that Grohl and co. operate best as a “singles band” rather than an “albums band.”

The degrees of that autopilot mindset vary throughout, though. Penultimate track “Amen, Caveman” is among the most glaring culprits. There’s Grohl snarling the song title. There are the big, epic guitars fit for festival grounds or a basketball arena. Two verses, three choruses, and a bridge. When the Foo Fighters are not throwing together a hackneyed hodgepodge of general rock signifiers, they’re blatantly pulling from their influences, which they’ve done before in far more interesting ways. Whereas Hawkins’ drums on “Rope” were a fun allusion to Neil Peart’s sticking pattern on “YYZ,” Grohl and his bandmates opt for a rough emulation of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” on “If You Only Knew.” Occasionally, though, those evocations happen to result in some more memorable material. That chromatic guitar riff and chugging bassline on “Window,” funnily enough, sound a little like In Utero. But Grohl dispels the short-lived reverie with an unwieldy metaphor: “Then I saw your face / There in the window / You were a window cleaner / Letting in the sun.”

It’s not the only moment where Grohl’s cumbersome lyrics get in the way of his band’s more engaging performances. On “Spit Shine,” Pat Smear, Chris Shiflett, Nate Mendel, and new drummer Ilan Rubin rip through a garage-rock heater, and then Grohl comes in with “pull yourself up, Mr. Man.” “Unconditional” scans as a vague apology, likely intended for Grohl’s wife Jordyn Blum, that could, frankly, be about anything. The ambiguity doesn’t help the fact that, like much of Your Favorite Toy, the music itself is interchangeable. Oliver Roman’s flat production blurs all the guitars together to the point of anonymity. Walk into your local Guitar Center and you’re likely to hear the same wafer-thin distortion.

There are still glimmers of strong songwriting. Calling Grohl, a 57-year-old man, emotionally mature feels a bit silly, but “Child Actor” displays a self-awareness of his “nicest guy in rock” public image and how those perceptions have shifted over the years, from his days in Nirvana to his present infidelity conundrum. “Was it ever good enough? / Anything to be the person you want,” he sings, the emotion in his voice raw and palpable. Sincerity has always suited Grohl well, but that sincerity curdles into amorphous schmaltz when it loses its specificity. “Think I’ll stick around / ‘Cuz there’s something to believe in,” he shouts on “Spit Shine.” If only we knew what that something was. [RCA]

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.