In 1995, Foo Fighters released their eponymous debut album, recorded by Dave Grohl alone the previous year in the months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide. The contemporary press was revealing: the album was not greeted with the universal warmth one might have expected. Interviewers and critics seemed to be suspicious and combative. There was a consensus that the album was selling well due to residual affection for Nirvana, or as a kind of mass sympathy vote; that either way, it was unlikely to be a project with legs. One frequent line of questioning involved picking over its lyrics for references to his former band and its late frontman, despite Grohl’s repeated insistence that almost all the songs predated Cobain’s death and that the album was not an act of posthumous reflection or mourning – whatever grieving he had to do was done in private.
