Violet GrohlFor Violet Grohl, making music stems from an innate need to create, somewhere deep inside.
Yes, she grew up with music around her. Her father, Dave Grohl, is the ringleader of one of the biggest rock bands in the world – and played the drums for another – and his famous friends include Elton John and Paul McCartney.
But still, the songs on Violet Grohl’s debut album, Be Sweet To Me, out this Friday (29 May) prove that even with her upbringing, she’s not in anybody’s shadow. She’s more than capable of stringing her own songs and band together, with her ideas at the forefront.
In January, Grohl signed a major record deal with Republic Records / Island EMI through her own imprint, Auroura Records. When The Music inquires about the record deal – the young singer-songwriter is in Australia, Zooming from Universal Music’s office in Sydney ahead of her performance at the label’s Ignite showcase – Grohl discusses the “refreshing” feeling she felt at the Republic office.
“When I walked into the Republic office and sat down for a meeting with everybody, the connection that everyone had with each other was so apparent,” she says. “There was this friendliness and really positive vibe that I hadn’t felt in that kind of corporate space before. Everyone was so kind to me and actually wanted to get to know me and talk about my interests, other than music.
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She adds, “It was really refreshing and something that I didn’t even know was possible, I guess, but they’ve been so lovely to me. Honestly, I kind of knew from the second I met everybody. I was like, ‘This is where I want to be, and these are the people I want to work with.’
“It’s been so much fun, and I’ve had such a great time working with them. They’ve really supported my vision in such a beautiful way; I really could not be more grateful.”
Be Sweet To Me had to be all hers. The stories are personal – the album title Be Sweet To Me is an inside joke for Grohl and her friends, a phrase indicating surrender when ribbing at each other becomes too much – but the musicality is where the record really hits.
The production on her songs is unshakably heavy, with fuzzed-out, gritty guitars and hard-hitting drums swirling around Grohl’s tender voice.
While she was writing, Grohl drew inspiration from her love of films, particularly those directed by David Lynch. And perhaps, the best part of Be Sweet To Me is that it feels like it could be heard in the nightclub scene of an artistic film, a feeling she says she “unintentionally” revealed throughout the album.
“I’m a very visual person, and I’ve always written in a kind of more visual or symbolic kind of way,” Grohl tells. “I’ve always liked having a landscape built for me when I listen to music; I really want to dive in. And so, I think that my love of cinema and watching movies and then music, it’s kind of like they’ve crossed over in a way.”
There are plenty of moody soundscapes to be heard throughout Be Sweet To Me. Last Day I Loved You stands out with its melodies and the loud chorus, and throughout the album, Grohl says it was “super important” to explore different aspects of her artistry.
“It was super, super important to me,” she shares. “I love so many different genres, and I’m just a lover of music in general. I didn’t want to box myself into one kind of category and end up getting stuck there; I wanted to experiment with all of the sounds that I love and incorporate them with each other and build a soundscape of a bunch of my different favourite genres.”
Last Day I Loved You is just the beginning of the surprises. Songs like Mobile Star – containing a somewhat menacing intro that feels very Lynchian, dare we say – the thrash-laden Often Others and the grunge-forward 595 and Cool Buzz have an undeniable heavy metal energy, anchored by muscly riffs. And Grohl loves a good riff.
Enthusing that good riffs are “so important,” Grohl gives a shout-out to her close collaborator and guitarist, Joe Kennedy, and enthuses, “My guitar player, Joe Kennedy, who I worked with on this record, he is a riff savant.
“Like, there is nobody that can write a riff like him, and he did such a beautiful job at picking up on the emotion I was trying to portray or the feel, the vibe and turning that into a beautiful riff that just adds to the song and helps build up that world.”
Other songs on the album, such as Big Memory and Applefish – the latter a poignant single – contain an indie rock feel, simultaneously capturing the rockier vibes of Blur and the songwriting of Phoebe Bridgers.
Discussing the not-so-surprising intersection of the past and present in her music, Grohl explains, “They cross over all the time. I love pulling things from my memory, sitting back and appreciating them, finding what I like about that era or that artist from that time, and just incorporating that into something with a more modern sound, instrumentation, or recording process. I think that it just blends together really nicely.”
While Grohl plays the guitar, piano, and bass guitar, she didn’t play any instruments on her debut record, instead focusing on conveying a range of emotions through her vocals and songwriting, as her kickass band captured her musical vision.
“I was kind of shy about it because I was surrounded by so many talented musicians and people who are really well versed in their instruments,” she admits. “And I kind of, I didn’t want to, like, brown out the vibe by picking up a guitar and playing like shit when everyone else is playing good [chuckles].”
But the process of Be Sweet To Me, and having other people perform her songs, has filled Grohl with confidence for album No. 2. “It’s something that I’ve been working on. But, you know, for this album, I didn’t play any instruments on it. But the next one, yes.”
That doesn’t mean that she didn’t play any instruments while brainstorming the songs on the record, though. “I would pick up an acoustic [guitar] and sit down with Ainjel [Emme], she plays bass for me, she’s amazing,” Grohl says. “She and I would sit down together with acoustic guitars and run over songs and try and come up with lyrical ideas or kind of round out the songs that we were already writing.
“And I felt like there was this beautiful synergy that happened when we would sit together with a guitar and just get like really real and raw with each other.”
One of the songs born in those sessions was the barn-burning epic album closer Plastic Couch, which slowly unfurls from a Radiohead-esque ballad to a noise-rock outro. “I love fuzz; I love sludge; I love a bit of distortion,” Grohl quips. “I love stuff like that—it just hits my ear in a certain way.”
She adds, “[Plastic Couch] was Ainjel and I sitting together and writing and just trying to really get this specific feeling and vibe that we were trying to capture.
“I wrote that song about having an image or a perception of something that you’re holding on to, or you’re clinging to, and that’s not the case anymore. And, you know, you’re stuck, knowing that it isn’t the way it used to be, but you wish it was.
“All I wanted to do with that song was to encapsulate that kind of grief, but it’s different than the grief when someone dies. It’s grief of a situation or of a person.”
Despite the heavy, ultra-relatable subject matter, Grohl affirms that Plastic Couch “was such a fun song to write,” and reveals that she and Emme wrote that song, and the album opener, THUM, “back-to-back.”
She explains, “So, THUM was the first day, and Plastic Couch was the second day, which is kind of crazy, now that I’m thinking back to it; I forgot about that! But, yeah, we totally did a flip. We switched vibes pretty drastically.”
Be Sweet To Me was produced by Justin Raisen (Kim Gordon, Angel Olsen, Yves Tumor) and recorded at his studio in California between late 2024 and into 2025.
Working with Raisen, Grohl says that she “learned so much” about herself, inspiring her to open up and “tap into a creative side of myself that I hadn’t really tapped into before.”
Before she met the producer, Grohl had a very different writing style and process, which was solitary rather than collaborative. She recalls, “I would just demo in my room by myself on my laptop, and I had my interface and my MIDI keyboard and a little microphone, and that’s what I did from the time I was 12 until I was 18.
“To go into a studio with other people and write with other people for the first time was intimidating, but it ended up taking this weight and pressure off that I would put on myself all the time when I would record alone. It made it not about me, but about the project and about the music and about what we’re trying to achieve.”
She continues, “I think that in itself has taught me a very big lesson. At the end of the day, music is for the greater good. There’s a bigger purpose. There’s a purpose that we don’t even understand when we’re making the music until maybe one day, it comes to us. But yeah, it was a really beautiful experience.”
While she’s learned plenty from her collaborators, Grohl already knew a lot about music. In fact, she has an “encyclopaedic” knowledge of music, from trip-hop to Scandinavian black metal. Somehow, that makes sense listening to her debut record.
“It started really early for me. My dad and I would sit in the car, and he would introduce bands to me or play me a song and tell me a story about the first time he listened to that song, or maybe he went to see the band play live or whatever it might be,” she shares.
“It was such a bonding experience for us to just sit and listen to music and share music with each other, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember.”
Then Grohl started seeking out music on her own. “I’ve always loved just sitting down and going through Spotify or whatever streaming platform it might be, and looking at playlists and finding albums that I’ve never listened to, or looking at interviews of artists I love and seeing what their favourite albums are. And you know, watching live performances and making playlists and making mixtapes and all of that,” she says.
She adds, “It’s been something that I’ve loved to do forever. In my spare time, I sit down, and I make playlists. It’s just the most beautiful and fun thing in the world to me; I love it. And it’s so connective. That’s another really beautiful thing about it: the way that people can bond over music or share stories about music and cry together, whatever it might be. It’s a really beautiful thing.”
Examining the most recent playlist she’s made, Grohl looks at the tunes she selected for the month of May. “I like to do monthly playlists, because I like to go back and see what I was listening to during different times,” she shares.
The playlist contains Zero 7’s Destiny featuring Australia’s own Sia, plus The Pretenders, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Kate Bush, Ride, Sinéad O’Connor, and Talk Talk’s classic, It’s My Life, which Grohl proclaims is “a great song!”
“I like making a monthly playlist where I can go back and remember, but I also love it if there’s a song I like and it has a really hyper-specific vibe,” she adds. “I like to see if I can find other songs that have the same kind of feeling, or maybe they just remind me of that song, and I like making a curated thing for myself.
“I love making playlists for other people, too. Like, if my friend asked me to make them a playlist, I’d do it in a heartbeat, for sure,” Grohl muses, looking forward to going down yet another musical wormhole, with that desire to create driving her every move.
Be Sweet To Me will be released on Friday, 29 May, via Republic Records / Island EMI through Violet Grohl’s imprint, Auroura Records.
