Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace by Foo Fighters

Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, the Foo Fighters' sixth album, arrived on Roswell and RCA on September 25, 2007, and it finds Dave Grohl trying to stretch past the usual arena roar. He brought back Gil Norton for their second record together, wanting to push his songs as far as they would go and come away with something that didn't sound like the band's earlier work.

The trick is contrast. Straight-up rock songs sit shoulder to shoulder with acoustic ones, and plenty of tracks swing between hush and holler in mid-flight, a mix that grew out of the grab bag of styles on the band's demos. Taylor Hawkins drives the heavy stuff, Nate Mendel anchors the bottom and Chris Shiflett adds guitar muscle. Grohl's lyrics look inward this time, some of them shaped by the birth of his daughter, and he was after songs his listeners could see themselves in. "The Pretender" is the pile-driver, "Long Road to Ruin" the sunny sprint, and "Let It Die" the slow fuse that finally blows.

Most critics liked the range and the songwriting, though a few heard it as patchy and short on spark. It topped the charts in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Austria, took the Brit Award for Best International Album, and collected five Grammy nominations, Album of the Year among them, winning Best Rock Album in 2008.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.