Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl Opens Up About the “Unfair” Loss of Taylor Hawkins

Dave Grohl is still reeling from the death of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins. “That event turned our world upside down,” the frontman revealed in a candid new interview with the British music mag MOJO.

This marks Grohl’s most extensive reflection on the tragedy since Hawkins’ passing in 2022. “It made me question everything in life because it was just so unfair,” he admits. “I’m still struggling to wrap my head around it.”

Hawkins was just 50 years old when he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest. He had been the heartbeat of the Foo Fighters since joining in 1997, shortly after the band’s inception.

To process the sudden loss, Grohl turned to the one thing he knew: music. It’s a path he’s walked before, following the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in 1994—an era of grief that ultimately birthed the Foo Fighters’ debut. “We realized we had to do this,” Grohl says, “because it had saved us before.”

While a new record wasn’t originally on the cards, a year of grieving led to “forty or fifty instrumental tracks” sitting on the shelf. Grohl eventually honed in on a series of eight recordings that felt raw, fast, and high-energy. “That’s exactly what we need,” he recalled thinking.

The new album, Your Favorite Toy, is set to drop on April 24th.