Shame Shame

This is the lead single from Medicine at Midnight. The Foo Fighters started recording the album in October 2019 in a large 1940s house in the Encino section of Los Angeles with producer Greg Kurstin. By March 2020, they'd finished mixing and mastering the record, and the tapes were on the way to the plant to be pressed into vinyl. Then Covid-19 shut the world down and everything was delayed. The band eventually dropped "Shame Shame" after debuting it on the November 7, 2020 episode of Saturday Night Live.

Frontman Dave Grohl has described Medicine At Midnight as a Saturday night party album inspired by David Bowie's Let's Dance era. This song, he told Radio.com, contains "this weird, rolling sort of loop groove that we've never attempted before." He added to SiriusXM's Jeff Regan: "That song is not really a party [song]. I mean, it's got a groove unlike anything we've ever done before, and it has a dynamic and a vibe and a tone unlike anything we've ever done before, which is why I wanted to release it first. You want to give people some sort of indication, like, 'Okay, this isn't exactly like the other nine records. This is moving into another territory.' It's not necessarily indicative of all of the other songs, but it does have its place on the record."

The ambiguous lyrics reference feelings of shame. A possible interpretation is that Grohl is singing from the point of view of an abuser in a relationship ("Now I got you. Under my thumb like a drug, I will smother you.") More likely, they're just a series of stream-of-consciousness lyrics he ad-libbed after coming up with the groove.