Foo Fighters Swing Wide With 10-Minute Epic 'The Teacher'

Just a few days out from the release of their monumental 11th album, But Here We Are, the Foo Fighters have shared one final preview: a 10-minute epic called The Teacher.

It starts rather pensively, with Dave Grohl singing sweetly over a simple, balladesque guitar line: “Who’s at the door now? / Sun goes down, windows wide / One step closer to the other side / I can feel what others do / Can’t stop this if I wanted to.”

Just under a minute and a half in, the melancholy shifts into an energised blast of rock’n’roll – adrenalised by the rest of the band’s spirited rocking, Grohl’s next verse alludes to the Foos’ choice to keep moving forward in the wake of Taylor Hawkins’ death last March. He sings: “Hurry now boy, time won’t wait / The here and the now will separate / There are some things you cannot choose / Soul and spirit moving through.”

The song only soars in intensity from there, building into a passionate surge of shredding guitars and thrashing symbols (with a cheeky fake-out around four minutes in, to boot). A proper return to the slower vibe comes just after the five-minute point, when Grohl gets real for a heart-wrenching verse about loss: “You showed me how to need, but never showed me how to say goodbye / You showed me how to grieve, but never showed me how to say goodbye / Every page turns, it’s a lesson learned in time / You showed me how to need, but never showed me how to say goodbye.”

The poignant verse paves the way for a comfortable swerve into prog-rock territory, where it’s repeated a few times alongside another stirring line: “Try and make good with the air that’s left / Counting every minute / Living breath by breath.” We get one final crescendo at around eight-and-a-half minutes, ending with Grohl screaming a simple refrain into the ether as he drowns in distortion: “Goodbye.”

The Teacher arrives in tandem with an absolute trip of a music video, directed by Tony Oursler and produced by Alice Ko. You can check that out below.

The Teacher is the fourth and final single to come from But Here We Are, following the release of Rescued last month, and both Under You and Show Me How earlier in May. The album itself was first revealed on New Year’s Eve last year, and will be out this Friday (June 2) – you can pre-order it here.

Grohl performed all of the drums on But Here We Are, while Josh Freese was announced as Hawkins’ touring replacement last week.

Also last week, the Foo Fighters performed their first full concert since Hawkins’ passing. They delivered a career-spanning 21-song setlist, which included the live debuts of But Here We Are songs Rescued, Under You, Nothing At All and the title track, as well as the first live performance of Cold Day In The Sun since 2018.