Foo Fighters Perform First Tiny Desk Concert with Set Spanning New Cuts and Canon Staples

After three decades as one of rock’s most enduring arena acts, Foo Fighters finally made their way to the NPR office for a first ever Tiny Desk Concert. The appearance arrives during a busy stretch behind their new album Your Favorite Toy, though the setlist reached across the full arc of the catalogue.

They opened with “Spit Shine,” one of the louder cuts from the new LP. The Tiny Desk format asks for something acoustic-ish, but the band brought enough volume and physicality to shake the room a little. That tension between the intimate setting and the instinct to tear through a song gave the performance its shape. “Learn to Fly” followed and found a more natural fit in the stripped down arrangement.

Before “Child Actor,” a song they played recently on Saturday Night Live UK, Dave Grohl offered a story about his appearance on that show. He hadn’t gotten a haircut beforehand and, mid-song, inhaled his own hair. The result, as Grohl described it, was something like the sound a cat makes coughing up a furball. At the end of the Tiny Desk take, he made a point of confirming no such incident had occurred.

The set closed with two songs from 1997’s The Colour and The Shape. The NPR crowd sang the chorus back for “My Hero,” and “Everlong,” Foo Fighters’ usual closer, landed as a faithful reading of the song that has ended countless shows. Between songs Grohl named two of his own favorite Tiny Desk appearances: D.C. funk outfit Trouble Funk and the rapper Juvenile, both nods to his hometown and to a series that has long balanced genre with legacy.

The band comes into this moment after a run that included a club show in New York, a Colbert appearance, a guest spot on the web series Track Star and a headline slot at Welcome to Rockville. A major 2026 tour with Queens of the Stone Age begins in August. But this brief set for a small room, surrounded by bookshelves and a modest audience, crossed off something that had stayed off the calendar for years.