Dave Grohl opens the Take Cover tour at Rogers Stadium in Toronto.
Dave Grohl opens the Take Cover tour at Rogers Stadium in Toronto.
The Foo Fighters Take Cover stadium run opened at Toronto’s Rogers Stadium on 4 August with a 26-song set, the band’s first show in the city since 2018. Exactly one of those 26 songs came from Your Favorite Toy, the album the tour is nominally supporting.
That is not an oversight. It is the clearest statement of intent the band has made about what this tour is for, and the setlist reads less like a new-album showcase than a career audit performed at stadium volume.
One New Song Out of Twenty-Six
The lone Your Favorite Toy track was “Caught in the Echo,” which landed at number 23, deep into the back half of the night and immediately before “Best of You” closed the main set. Placing a new song there is a vote of confidence: it sat in the slot most bands reserve for a guaranteed singalong, and it held.
Everything else came from the back catalogue, and the weighting is revealing. There Is Nothing Left to Lose from 1999 supplied four songs, the most of any record. The Colour and the Shape (1997), Wasting Light (2011) and Concrete and Gold (2017) contributed three apiece. For a band with a new record in shops, that is a deliberate choice to sell the history rather than the release.
The Set That Framed the Decision
They opened on “All My Life” from 2002’s One by One and moved quickly through “The Pretender,” “Times Like These,” “Rope,” “Stacked Actors,” “My Hero,” “Learn to Fly,” “These Days,” “Walk,” “This Is a Call” and “No Son of Mine.” That last one carried a snippet of Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” the first of several nods to other people’s records in a show whose title invites exactly that.
The pacing then broke deliberately. Rather than push straight to the encore, the band walked out to a B-stage for four stripped-back songs before returning to the main structure for the run home.
The B-Stage Was the Emotional Centre
The acoustic section ran “Wheels,” “Marigold,” “Big Me” and “Under You.” “Marigold” is the deep cut here, a song from Dave Grohl’s pre-Foo Fighters life that has spent most of the band’s career out of rotation.
“Under You” was dedicated to Shane Hawkins on his twentieth birthday, the son of the band’s late drummer Taylor Hawkins. Later in the set, “Aurora” was played in Hawkins’ memory. Neither dedication was announced as a set piece, and both landed harder for it.
The encore closed the loop: “The Teacher,” dedicated to Grohl’s late mother Virginia, then “Everlong” under fireworks. A band that has spent four years playing through loss has stopped treating that as a subject to be handled and started treating it as part of the show’s furniture.
A Medley Built From Everyone Else’s Bands
The night’s genuine curiosity arrived at number 18: a medley stringing “Invincible” into “Seven,” “One Headlight,” “Manimal” and “Tap Dancing in a Minefield.” The through-line is that the songs come from the members’ previous bands, turning a stadium set into a round of introductions.
Grohl took the drum stool for Ilan Rubin’s contribution, “Tap Dancing in a Minefield,” which is both a neat joke and a reminder of where he started. Rubin got his own showcase two songs later, with a drum solo inside “Monkey Wrench.”
It is a segment that only works for a band comfortable enough to spend five minutes of a stadium headline slot on material the audience did not come for. That comfort is the same instinct behind playing one new song out of 26.
Why the Tour Name Is Doing Real Work
Read the night back and the title stops looking like a pun on a Foo Fighters song and starts looking like a brief. Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” surfaced inside “No Son of Mine.” “Marigold” came back from Grohl’s pre-Foo Fighters catalogue. The number-18 medley handed the stage to four songs the band did not write. Over in the support slot, Queens of the Stone Age folded a snippet of the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” into “Make It Wit Chu.”
None of that is unusual on its own. Rock bands have always dropped snippets. What is unusual is the density: on a night with 26 slots to fill and a new record to sell, the band spent a meaningful share of them on other people’s material and on their own members’ side histories. A tour called Take Cover that does exactly that is not hiding its thesis.
The commercial logic is not complicated either. Stadium audiences in 2026 are paying premium prices for a guaranteed night, and recognition is the product. A cover, a snippet or a 1997 single all deliver that instantly. A new song has to earn it. Putting “Caught in the Echo” at number 23 rather than number three is a band backing its new material without betting the evening on it.
Queens of the Stone Age Came Back Loud
Queens of the Stone Age took the stage at 6:30pm for an hour, pulling eleven songs from five albums. The set ran through “Misfit Love,” “In My Head,” “My God Is the Sun,” “I Sat by the Ocean,” “If I Had a Tail,” “Emotion Sickness,” “Make It Wit Chu” (which picked up a snippet of the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You”) and “Little Sister” before closing on three consecutive tracks from 2002’s Songs for the Deaf: “Go With the Flow,” “No One Knows” and “A Song for the Dead.”
For anyone who caught Josh Homme’s recent semi-acoustic Catacombs shows, the return to full volume is the story. Mannequin Pussy opened the night with five songs, all drawn from their 2024 album I Got Heaven.
Foo Fighters took the stage at 8:05pm. On a bill where the support act is a headliner in its own right, the running order is a flex of its own, and it puts this run in the same bracket as the other veteran acts filling stadiums this summer, from Iron Maiden’s fiftieth-anniversary shows onward.
What the Rest of the Run Has to Prove
Foo Fighters Take Cover continues through North America and closes on 26 September at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. The open question is whether “Caught in the Echo” stays the only representative of Your Favorite Toy or whether more of the record works its way in as the run settles.
Opening nights are also the least reliable guide to a tour. Set lists move as a run beds in, and a band that has spent months rehearsing an album rarely leaves it in the case for seven weeks. The Toronto show is a data point, not a verdict, and the next few stadiums will say more about whether “Caught in the Echo” was a toe in the water or the ceiling.
There is a reasonable argument for holding back. Opening-night crowds want the songs they know, and a 26-song set that spends 25 of them on proven material is a low-risk way to start a tour. There is an equally reasonable argument that a band this deep into its career only gets a new album to land once, and one song a night is a thin way to do it.
The Foo Fighters Take Cover tour has seven weeks to decide which of those it believes. On the evidence of Toronto, the band is in no hurry to be argued out of the first one.
This article was AI-assisted and edited for accuracy.
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