Foo Fighters have been done with their new album Medicine At Midnight for a long time, and they had big plans for it last year. Those plans were all scrambled, but the band is gearing up to finally release the album next month. We’ve posted the early tracks “Shame Shame” and “No Son Of Mine.” Today, the Foos have dropped another new track called “Waiting On A War.”

In its structure, “Waiting On A War” is an old-school power ballad. It starts out tender, with Dave Grohl singing over acoustic strums and with strings circling him in the background, before the bigger guitars kick in. But the song feels a little more urgent than the power-ballad term implies, even though it’s still definitely radio-rock. There’s some stressed-out intensity to the whole song, right from the first lines: “I was waiting on a war when I was young/ Since I was a little boy with a toy gun.”

Talking to Rolling Stone, Dave Grohl explains that “Waiting On A War” is built on cold-war anxieties and on the way those anxieties don’t seem to be disappearing in the current age. Here’s what he says:

Last fall, as I was driving my daughter to school, she turned to me and asked, “Daddy, is there going to be a war?” My heart sank as I realized that she was now living under the same dark cloud that I had felt 40 years ago. I wrote “Waiting On A War” that day. Every day waiting for the sky to fall. Is there more to this than that? Is there more to this than just waiting on a war? Because I need more. We all do. This song was written for my daughter, Harper, who deserves a future, just as every child does.

Listen below.

Medicine At Midnight is out 2/5 on Roswell/RCA. Pre-order it here.