Foo Fighters review: But Here We Are finds a band working through grief

For whatever reason, songs about male friendship and fraternal love are almost entirely absent from rock and pop music.

Maybe it's a machismo thing - a fear of looking soft, an outdated model of manhood - but there are almost no male equivalents to songs like The Spice Girls' Wannabe, or Taylor Swift's I'm Only Me When I'm With You, written about her BFF Abigail Anderson

Rock music, in particular, has always been more concerned with sex, love, status and power than camaraderie or platonic relationships.

So when Dave Grohl sings about Taylor Hawkins on Foo Fighters' new album, But Here We Are, it hits you like a truck.

"I had a person I loved and, just like that, I was left to live without him."

Hawkins died suddenly in his hotel room last year at the age of 50, just hours before Foo Fighters were due to perform at a festival in Colombia.

It was a devastating loss. Hawkins was more than just the band's drummer. He was Grohl's sidekick, confidante and brother in arms.

"Upon first meeting, our bond was immediate and we grew closer with every day, every song, every note that we ever played together," the musician wrote in his 2021 memoir, The Storyteller.

"We are absolutely meant to be and I am grateful that we found each other in this lifetime," he added, calling him, "my brother from another mother, my best friend, a man from whom I would take a bullet".

Soon after Hawkins died, Grohl also lost his mother, Virginia - who had raised him as a single parent in Washington, DC, and allowed him to drop out of school to pursue music.

So it's no surprise that grief looms large over this album. Grohl describes himself as walking in circles, haunted by voices, waiting for storms to pass.

Time is moving forward for everyone but him; and he's plagued by thoughts of his own mortality.

"I think I'm getting over it," he sings on Under You. "But, there's no getting over it."

It all comes to a head on The Teacher, an epic, shape-shifting rock song that moves through all five stages of mourning in 10 minutes.

Seemingly directed towards his mother, a public school teacher for most of her life, it is sombre and vulnerable one minute, and scorching with anger the next; with a dark, detuned guitar riff that threatens to choke the song's more uplifting chorus.

"You showed me how to breathe, but you never showed me how to say goodbye," Grohl laments, and the song grows in intensity, as though he's trying to build a tower to heaven. When he reaches the summit, there's a cathartic scream of "goodbye" before the music collapses in a bit-crushed fuzz of digital distortion.

It's a stunning response to the pain of last year... As is the rest of the album, which hums with an intensity and focus that Foo Fighters' more recent outings have lacked.

Musically, it's back to basics. Muscular chords and melodic riffs are the order of the day, as the band power through their sadness.

Under You has a fizzing pop melody that's among Grohl's finest. The title track is like drinking razor blades from a paper cup - all sawtooth guitars and primal scream vocals. Grohl sounds like he's disintegrating as he howls: "I gave you my heart, but here we are".

By contrast, Show Me How is a tender, reflective duet with his daughter Violet. Over a gauzy twilight groove, they tentatively plan for the future, father and daughter offering equal reassurance to one another: "I'll take care of everything from now on".

The gorgeous piano ballad Beyond Me also probes at the possibility of normal life resuming, even if Grohl can't contemplate what that would look like. "You must release what you hold dear," he sings, "or so I fear."

In black and white it might sound heavy-going, but there's an urgency to these 10 songs that balances out the pain. With their nerves burned raw, the band sound revitalised, defiantly alive, determined to honour Hawkins' spirit.

Making their live return in Washington DC earlier this week, with veteran session drummer Josh Freese behind the kit, Grohl said as much.

"Getting up and playing shows again has been weird," he said. "Not a day goes by where we don't think about him or talk about him. So this one's for T."

It's a reminder that, although the band continues, Hawkins will always be with them.

And perhaps Grohl's honesty and vulnerability about his loss will inspire other writers to tackle the subject of male friendship.

It's notable that, when men do discuss those bonds, it's almost always too late: Diddy's I'll Be Missing You is a tear-stained tribute to the rapper Notorious B.I.G.; Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here describes the loss of Syd Barrett to mental illness; Ed Sheeran's Eyes Closed is about the void Jamal Edwards' death left in his life.

But with TV shows like Ted Lasso opening up the discussion about platonic love and brotherly affection, there could be a rich new lyrical seam for musicians to explore.

For Hawkins, what a legacy that would be.