Foo Fighters New Album Art Revealed?
With a new album and documentary series due from the band this fall, Foo Fighters fans have plenty to be excited about these days -- and the band looks like it's ready to start the publicity campaign for what promises to be a very busy few months.
The NME reports that the band engineered a sort of social media treasure hunt on Aug. 4, using their accounts at various services (including Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook) to post a series of eight photos and GPS coordinates that add up to the image you see at the top of this article -- a visual composite of landmarks from Seattle, Chicago, New York, Hollywood, Washington, D.C., Austin, New Orleans and Nashville, on a landscape embedded with eights.
The band hasn't commented on what exactly the picture is supposed to signify, but it isn't a complete mystery. Their upcoming HBO miniseries, 'Sonic Highways,' finds them traveling to the aforementioned cities to record the new album (their eighth), visiting and working with local musical luminaries along the way. Described as "a love letter to the history of American music," 'Highways' includes appearances from a long and eclectic list of guests, including Kiss co-founder Paul Stanley, Joe Walsh of the Eagles, Heart's Nancy Wilson, Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen, country star Zac Brown, and Grammy-winning artist Gary Clark, Jr. You can watch a teaser for the series here:
Foo Fighters 'Sonic Highways' HBO Teaser
The show is scheduled to debut on Oct. 17, and sources have told Billboard that the album -- which producer Butch Vig recently described as "EPIC!!!" after finishing nearly a month of mixing -- will arrive in stores in November. "As we were coming down from the success of the last record [2011's Grammy-winning 'Wasting Light'], I thought, 'Now we have license to get weird,'" Foos founder Dave Grohl enthused in the Billboard piece. "If we wanted, we could make some crazy, bleak Radiohead record and freak everyone out. Then I thought, 'F--- that.' ... The music is a progression or an evolution, for sure, but it's a Foo Fighters record."
For now, we still need to wait to experience all that weirdness, and puzzle over what the band intends to do with this image. But we may not need to wait long: According to the Foo Fighters Facebook page, they've got "some big news" to share in Aug. 11.