Dave Grohl Reflects on Taylor Hawkins' Death and Foo Fighters' Future

We always talk about him every fucking day," Dave Grohl told Zane Lowe on Apple Music in March 2026, breaking a four-year interview silence to reflect on the death of Taylor Hawkins and the Foo Fighters' path toward a new punk-inspired album called Your Favorite Toy.

The conversation carried particular weight because it took place on what would have been Hawkins' 54th birthday. Grohl, 57, acknowledged the timing directly: "It's Taylor's birthday today. And so, we wake up in the morning and everybody just texts about how much we miss him and how the world's not the same without him, but we still feel him very much."

Hawkins died on March 25, 2022, found dead in his hotel room in Bogotá, Colombia, hours before Foo Fighters were scheduled to headline the Estéreo Picnic festival. He was 50. He had been the band's drummer for 25 years, having replaced original drummer William Goldsmith in 1997.

Grohl made clear how central Hawkins was to the band's identity beyond his drumming. "We had Taylor Hawkins as our drummer for 25 years and, beyond being an amazing drummer, he was this incredible spirit. He was this incredible human being and he was our brother. He was our best friend. So, continuing after Taylor was really complicated, not just for us, but for any drummer that was going to come in to like, you know, fill his shoes."

That complication extended into the recording studio. In MOJO, whose issue featuring the interview went on sale Tuesday March 17, Grohl described the band's approach to making 2023's But Here We Are, recorded while he was still processing both Hawkins' death and the death of his mother Virginia five months later. "We were going to record live, the five of us, and we would play the drum tracks from speakers in the room. We'd hit the chord and play along to these drums. But there was no one there. There was just this void, and we were desperately trying to fill it." Grohl played drums on that record himself, still raw from the losses.

The parallels to an earlier chapter of grief are not lost on him. MOJO reports that Grohl drew a direct line between But Here We Are and the Foo Fighters' 1995 debut, which he recorded in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain's death and then took on the road with Pat Smear, Nate Mendel and Goldsmith. When Hawkins died 30 years later, Grohl said, the band "realized this was something we needed to do. Because it had saved us once before."

The new album Your Favorite Toy, described by MOJO as punk-inspired and due to be the band's twelfth studio record, represents the next stage of that survival. Grohl's energy for the work is unmistakable: "Before, I was running on fumes and unleaded gas. Now I'm just burning fucking diesel."

Personnel changes have complicated the road forward. Grohl addressed publicly for the first time the departure of Josh Freese, the drummer who had been working with the band following Hawkins' death. Freese's exit left Grohl "shocked and disappointed," according to reporting on his comments.

Through the lineup changes and the ongoing grief, the intention remains fixed. "In everything we do we want to have that energy," Grohl said. "We want to have that energy for Taylor." The full Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe is available to stream now.