2011 garage tape: Wasting Light, Butch Vig, Lemmy in the clip
White Limo sits on Foo Fighters’ seventh studio album Wasting Light, released 12 April 2011 on Roswell / RCA. The band recorded entirely to analog tape in Dave Grohl’s garage in California’s San Fernando Valley with producer Butch Vig. No digital backup: tape, sound leaking between the instruments, and live-in-the-room volume. The song runs about three minutes twenty-two seconds. Grohl sings through heavy distortion; Taylor Hawkins drives a straight, hard drum pattern; Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett, and Pat Smear lock thick guitars and bass underneath. Alan Moulder mixed the album.
RCA issued White Limo as the second single on 28 March 2011, after Rope. It reached number 28 on the UK Rock & Metal Singles Chart. Critics heard Judas Priest and Motörhead in the riff and said so in print. On the record you hear why the garage constraint mattered: tape compression and amp scrape give the guitars a physical edge a clean digital grid does not. Grohl throws the lines rather than singing them clean. It sits in the main album sequence as a case of the band choosing a rough sound on purpose, closer to a Motörhead bark than to ballad Foo Fighters singles.
The video made the link between the two bands obvious. Shot in a rough VHS style and released in February 2011, it features Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead driving the white limousine of the title while the band play comic hard-rock scenarios. Grohl has never hidden his Motörhead worship; putting Lemmy on camera made the homage literal. The clip matches the record: it does not quiet down to sound fashionable.
Pat Smear rejoined the live and studio circle around this era. Elsewhere on Wasting Light, guests such as Bob Mould and Krist Novoselic show range; this cut shows volume with a clear target. The album topped charts in several countries and won major awards, but White Limo was never the polite radio face of that campaign. It was the track that showed the garage tape could still sound rough.
And on that note, the careening, Judas Priest-style metal homage ‘White Limo’ is the most singularly badass thing the band has released in the last ten years.
(Jeff Terich, Treble, 2011)
On Wasting Light, the track is the clearest case of Foo Fighters picking a rough sound over a polished one when the tape was rolling. Live, it still clears softer mid-set songs off the floor when the riff lands at full volume. Hawkins’ snare stays hard and open; Grohl’s shredded vocal never softens for daytime play.
The opening riff, the shredded vocal, and the hard snare carry it. Lemmy is already driving the white limo in the clip, so the track does not need extra decoration.
Amy | 11 October 2026
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Opened the article, heard the riff in my head before the embed loaded. Classic.
Théo | 12 October 2026
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Heard White Limo a thousand times. This reminded me why it stuck. Needed that.
Jules M. | 12 October 2026
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This is the track I put on to test new speakers. Foo Fighters never lies. I told my coworker and they shrugged. Their loss. I am biased and fine with it.
Ivan | 13 October 2026
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Not overrated. If anything people forgot how tight White Limo is. I told my coworker and they shrugged. Their loss. Ok bye.
Alex | 14 October 2026
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Ok but who else puts White Limo on at 1am and feels seen? Sharing this in the group chat. Expect chaos. Needed that.
Rita | 15 October 2026
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My dad played Foo Fighters in the car. White Limo is basically my childhood commute. Needed that.
Tom Riff | 15 October 2026
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people sleep on how weird White Limo actually is. This article gets it. Sharing this in the group chat. Expect chaos.