There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes with a famous surname, and Violet Grohl has spent the better part of her young life navigating it gracefully. She’s long been orbiting the rock world — covering X alongside her father, joining the Foo Fighters on the road, and singing “All Apologies” with surviving Nirvana members. Though on her debut album, Be Sweet To Me, the 20-year-old is past all of that, stepping into her own version of the limelight, and trying as hard as she can to avoid the nepo baby curse.
No one would fault her for going for that 2000s alt-rock vibe her father helped shape, but instead, she sinks her teeth into a vibe similar to The Breeders, Hole, and all of the sound of central tension between sweetness and grit, between melody and noise. Opening track “Thum” is a fuzzy ripper — a confident statement of intent that arrives with enough fuzz and forward momentum to show that Grohl means business. “595” is even better: a sly, sexy slasher filled with jolts of noise and a killer chorus, inspired, brilliantly, by vintage phone sex line advertising, kind of like old Kim Gordon.
The songs on Be Sweet To Me tend to be impressionistic, coloured by Grohl’s love of film and particularly the work of David Lynch, and that Lynchian quality — the sense of something slightly off beneath a bright surface. The closer, “Plastic Couch” really surprised me; how can a 20-year-old understand hypnotic dysphoria so well?
The 32-minute album arrives during a moment when younger rock artists are revisiting the aesthetics and production approaches of ’90s alternative music, but Grohl doesn’t feel like a revivalist. Instead, she sounds like someone who absorbed all of that naturally and is filtering it through her own sensible veil.
