The Colour and the Shape by Foo Fighters

The Colour and the Shape, Foo Fighters' second album, came out on Roswell and Capitol on May 20, 1997, and it's the first time the Foo Fighters sounded like an actual band. Dave Grohl had written and played the whole debut himself; this time he had guitarist Pat Smear, bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith, and producer Gil Norton was brought in to sharpen the pop instincts. The goal was a full-blooded rock record, not another grunge knockoff.

Getting there was messy. Early sessions at Bear Creek Studio in Washington went badly and most of the tapes were scrapped. When the band regrouped in Hollywood at Grandmaster Recordings in early 1997, Grohl took over on drums himself, and Goldsmith, stung that his parts had been redone, quit soon after. Much of the writing grew out of Grohl's 1996 divorce from photographer Jennifer Youngblood, and the track list was laid out like a therapy session, swinging between tender ballads and uptempo bursts to mirror feelings at war with each other.

You can hear the push and pull everywhere. "Monkey Wrench" is frantic and breathless, "My Hero" pounds like a marching army, "Walking After You" shows the gentler side, "Up in Arms" bolts, and "Everlong" manages tender and ferocious at once, racing along on a wall of guitars. It reached number ten on the Billboard 200 and number three in the UK, earned a nomination for Best Rock Album at the 40th Grammys, and remains the band's biggest seller in the US, with more than two million copies sold. A tenth-anniversary reissue followed in 2007.

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