Watch Foo Fighters let loose with new songs and old favourites on Tiny Desk

Foo Fighters stopped by the NPR offices to rattle through a five-song setlist as part of the broadcaster’s Tiny Desk series.

Playing in front of NPR’s staff, Dave Grohl and co. showcased two songs from their new album Your Favorite Toy, namely Spit Shine and Child Actor. They also played a handful of their greatest hits, including Learn To Fly, My Hero and Everlong.

“It’s an honour to be here. I’ve watched so many of these Tiny Desk shows and have a bunch of favourites. When I saw Trouble Funk squeeze into this office space here I thought, ‘It’s not that tiny,’” Dave says in the video.

Later, to introduce Child Actor, he says that he almost choked on his own hair while playing the song on Saturday Night Live UK recently.

“When you come out to perform [after months in the studio], you realise you haven’t had a haircut in a year and it becomes really hard to see the fretboard - not only hard to see the fretboard, but inhaling hair into your throat,” he says, joking that the noise he made on the last chorus as he choked was like “the furball sound your cat makes”.

“Let’s pray it doesn’t happen again,” he says.

In the run-up to the performance, the Foos had taped out the dimensions of the Tiny Desk in a practice space as they rehearsed to figure out how it would work in such a confined space. Any best laid plans, however, were quickly thrown out.

"If you put instruments in our hands and there are people," Dave jokes, "it's fun to play!"

Watch Foo Fighters' Tiny Desk set below:

Catch the band making their return this summer:

Foo Fighters UK and Europe tour 2026

June

10 Oslo Unity Arena
12 Stockholm Strawberry Arena
15 Warsaw PGE Narodowy
17 Munich Allianz Arena
19 Paris Paris La Défense Arena
25 Liverpool Anfield Stadium
27 Liverpool Anfield Stadium

July

1 Berlin Olympiastadion
3 Vienna Ernst-Happel-Stadium
5 Milan I-Days
8 Madrid Mad Cool Festival
10 Oeiras NOS Alive Festival

Read this next:

• Foo Throttle! How Foo Fighters conquered Welcome To Rockville
• “It’s about passion and courage and fighting for things you believe in”: The story of Foo Fighters’ In Your Honour
• The story of Foo Fighters’ Concrete And Gold: “All of the music we’ve made has left us a pretty open playing field”