Your Favorite Toy | Ilan Rubin's first Foo Fighters album

The Foo Fighters drum chair has been the most scrutinised seat in rock for four years. It now has someone in it, and a record to judge him on.

Your Favorite Toy, released 24 April 2026, is the band’s twelfth album and the first with Ilan Rubin behind the kit.

How it was recorded

The detail that matters for drummers: Dave Grohl and Rubin cut the rhythm tracks live together, with no click track, and the rest of the band overdubbed onto that.

That is an increasingly rare way to make a rock record, and it is audible. The tempos breathe. Sections push into choruses and settle back out of them, the way they do when two people in a room are listening to each other rather than to a grid.

It also explains the reviews. Several picked out the drumming as the best thing on the album — NME’s line was that Rubin “passes the audition with flying colours”, and that the strongest tracks are the ones where he is setting the pace.

The album was produced by the band with Oliver Roman, mixed by Mark “Spike” Stent — their first since Sonic Highways not produced by Greg Kurstin.

How we got here

Worth laying out, because it has moved quickly.

• Taylor Hawkins held the chair from 1997 until his death in March 2022.
• Dave Grohl played every drum track himself on 2023’s But Here We Are — his first Foos drum credit since 2005.
• Josh Freese was the touring drummer from May 2023 until May 2025, when he said the band had decided “to go in a different direction” and that no reason was given.
• Ilan Rubin, previously of Nine Inch Nails, was announced that summer and played his first show on 14 September 2025 at the 900-capacity Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo.

Freese then went the other way, joining Nine Inch Nails’ touring band — which looks like a swap, and which Rubin has been careful to say was not one. We covered the whole tangle, along with the extraordinary number of other bands who changed drummer at the same time, in Drummergeddon.

And they are opening for AC/DC

Foo Fighters support AC/DC at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis on 8 September 2026 — the first time the two bands have shared a stage.

Grohl called it a dream come true, and pointed at AC/DC’s 1980 concert film Let There Be Rock as the thing that showed him what a rock performance was supposed to look like. Given how he plays, that tracks.

Final thoughts

Replacing Taylor Hawkins was never going to be a fair job to hand anyone. Rubin has done the only sensible thing available and played like himself.

Recording it live with no click was the right call too — it is the decision that stops the album sounding like an audition.

Read our full Dave Grohl feature or see his full rig, era by era, in the Rig Vault.