“DOA” by Foo Fighters

"DOA" came barreling out of In Your Honor, the Foo Fighters' fifth album, as the 2005 follow-up single to "Best of You", and the title is the medical shorthand for dead on arrival. There's nothing lifeless about it, though: it's a lean, wiry rocker built on driving guitars and a chorus that arrives like a door kicked in. It sat at number one on Billboard's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart for six weeks, not all of them in a row, and the single's sleeve shows off an Ampeg Dan Armstrong guitar.

All four Foos share the writing credit, Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel and Chris Shiflett, and it plays like a band song, everybody pulling the same way. Nick Raskulinecz produced it with the group and mixed it too, with Mike Terry engineering, and they keep it tight and punchy, alternative rock that sounds best cranked with the windows down.

For all that punch, the band has called it the hardest song on In Your Honor to pull off live. It turned up often on the In Your Honor tour and the Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace tour, got a single airing on the Wasting Light tour, then vanished until a group of fans asked for it on the Sonic Highways tour in 2015. It hasn't been played since.

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