I’m just going to start by saying that nepo babies are fine with me if they meet two criteria: they have to be talented and their parents have to be cool. I have no problem with Rosanne Cash, for example and I don’t think many other music fans do either. The thing that people hate about nepo babies is the same thing that draws us to them. We want to know if they have whatever their parents had. We want to know if they’d make it without their last name.
Of all the nepo babies making waves right now the one I am instinctively drawn to is twenty year old Violet Grohl. She looks cool, with her soft goth aesthetic and attempt to bring back skinny eyebrows. Her influences are perfect – including The Breeders, PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley and Soundgarden. She’s who you’d want your kid to be, or your kids to listen to.
Opening song ‘THUM’ establishes the blueprint for much of this album: a blistering, gnarly crunching guitar sound is nicely juxtaposed with her softer voice. That gets flipped on the second song ‘595’ which begins with a sweet side before the guitars start to build a darker tone.
Lyrically there’s a little bit of menace and strangeness to the words – nothing is confessional or entirely makes sense in these songs which is weirdly a strength and harks back to another era where musicians didn’t have to excavate their inner psyche for attention.
‘Bug in the Cake’ with its ‘moving to grandmas’ hook is the strongest song on the album, a proper singalong tune that feels like her closest to a hit – if alternative 90s style weirdo songs still hit the charts. She wrote this one after her grandmother’s death and it’s a great tribute to an impressive woman.
The swirling darkness of ‘Last Day I Loved You’ never feels oppressive, and her voice really does have something beautiful about it. ‘Big Memory’ has a strong hook, making it another alt-radio friendly song.
Weirder, dreamier ‘Mobile Star’ has a little Mazzy Star and even Billie Eilish feel to it, which adds another dimension to her sound. This leads into the heaviest song on the album so far ‘Often Others’ which explores her metal influences, letting her scream out even amid the distortion. Songs like ‘Applefish’ and ‘Coolbuzz’ have a more loud/quiet variation of tone which has led to a lot of comparisons to Queens of the Stone Age and Pixies.
There’s a mix of Cocteau Twins and trip hop in the sound of ‘Pool of My Dreams’ and the song is a perfect soundtrack to having a goth summer breakdown by the pool. The only real acoustic song is the final one ‘Plastic Couch’ but even then it finishes off with a thumping roar of sound. Every time you think she’s going to go one way, things switch again.
My only reservation about this album is that she didn’t write these songs herself. Sure in the modern world every mainstream pop star works with producers and writing teams. But in the alternative music world these things still matter. Or they do to me anyway. For an artist who’s trying to establish her credibility it feels like a missed opportunity to show what she can do herself without her connections.
But in the end you have to conclude that the producer and writers she’s worked with have helped her to create an album which feels like a statement of intent at the beginning of a long career. She has confidently seized the opportunity her last name may have helped to create.
Violet Grohl’s music is heavy, dark and yet listenable in a way that a lot of alternative rock music hasn’t been for me for a while. If the title ‘Be Sweet to Me’ was an invitation to soften our critical stance towards nepo babies then she’s certainly done more than enough to win me over.
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