Foo Fighters Album Recommendations: "The Colour and the Shape"

Album Recommendations: The Colour and the Shape

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Foo Fighters

[#] The Colour and the Shape (1997)

A shiny, sugary table to the face.

Reviewed July 9, 2025

Like it or not, "Everlong" continues to thrive because it's a setpiece of pop rock passion. The urgency in the song, the skittering drums, the slightly eerie guitars bearing down on the mix. "Come down and waste away with me"—it's exert self-loathing in a catchy framework. The Colour and the Shape is usually considered the Foo's masterwork because it's the last time Dave Grohl regularly felt like he was putting his whole chest into it. Underneath the thick modern (for 1997) sheen is an album of intense dynamic shifts and an insecurity in the future of his band and himself, stakes that'd be lost in the Foo's rise to rock standard-bearers.

More than anything, Colour is a workout for Dave's vocals. The throat-searing bridges on "Monkey Wrench" and "Wind Up", the wails of "Enough Space"'s refrain, even the second-round howls that close out closer "New Way Home" signal that Dave was through being anonymous and was realizing the full range of his powerful voice. Paired with his monster drum performances (notoriously recording over most of a previous drummer's work in the process), The Colour and the Shape stays vital, hungry without ever leaving behind the lovely, sugary ballads in its middle third or the soaring choruses that make this album a regular on US rock radio some 28 years later.