Foo Fighters play 1995 classic 'This Is a Call' on Kimmel: watch

The Foo Fighters are spending the week parked at Jimmy Kimmel Live! as part of the late-night show's Halloween takeover, and on Tuesday (Oct. 27) they reached for the song that started it all: "This Is a Call," the opening track of their 1995 self-titled debut. That was the record Dave Grohl assembled more than 30 years ago after Nirvana ended, and it turned him into the frontman of one of the biggest stadium rock bands of this century.

It was night two of the band's four-night musical residency, which runs through the rest of the week. Monday went to "Window," a cut from their 12th and latest studio album, Your Favorite Toy; Tuesday flipped the script back three decades. Billboard's Lars Brandle called the performance "a blast from the past" - the Foos were tight, and loud.

"This Is a Call" is more than a crowd-pleaser. After Nirvana's Kurt Cobain died in April 1994, drummer Dave Grohl channeled grief into music: he wrote an entire album's worth of songs and recorded every instrument himself in a single week that October. He stepped from behind the kit to the front of the stage, and that self-titled debut - created, as Billboard puts it, out of misery - landed in June 1995 as the first of the band's 12 studio albums.

The career that followed now includes a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2021, on the band's first year of eligibility, with Paul McCartney doing the honors a little over three decades after those first songs.

What's next on the road

The Kimmel stay is a brief detour before a bigger one. Your Favorite Toy is the follow-up to 2023's But Here We Are, which peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 for the band's 10th top-tier entry - a streak that also includes No. 1 albums Wasting Light (2011) and Concrete and Gold (2017). Foo Fighters return to the road next week to begin another stadium tour of Australia.