The 2-building compound tucked into an industrial stretch northwest of Los Angeles appears to be like nondescript from the skin, however inside it’s a rock’n’roll nerd’s dream come true. Rooms are full of drugs stacked to the ceilings and big street circumstances stenciled with the identify of one of many world’s largest rock bands make hallway navigation a problem. Pop Tart varietals beckon from the kitchen, power drinks chill within the fridge and two Slayer-branded bottles of Jagermeister personalised to Dave Grohl lay unopened on a desk beneath a large TV.
However Grohl and his Foo Fighters pals are nowhere to be discovered as they get pleasure from some trip time earlier than beginning a world tour in assist of their new album, My Favourite Toy. So at this time, the studio’s rehearsal room is being commanded by Dave’s soon-to-be-20-year-old daughter Violet, who is determining what it means to entrance a band. Not theoretically, not sometime – proper now.
Once I meet her in April, she’s a number of weeks out from her first correct full-band set at a report retailer in Lengthy Seashore, and the room appears like a stress valve largely loosened. There’s numerous laughter, as Violet and her greatest good friend Persia (the daughter of latest wave icon Gary Numan) rattle off inside jokes in faux British accents. Violet hits her vape pen between songs and asks, “any grandmas in the home?” to no one specifically. Then the band kicks again in and every little thing tightens.
The songs from her debut album, Be Candy to Me, aren’t tentative. They arrive loud, fuzzy and dangerously catchy – constructed for motion however grounded in one thing extra inner. “THUM” will get issues off to a propulsive begin, its strutting riff and alternately candy and salty vocal supply recalling Songs for the Deaf-era Queens of the Stone Age and even early Foos. On the measured “595,” impressed by a t-shirt promoting a telephone intercourse hotline, drummer Anthony Lopez leans into fills that really feel virtually overqualified for the room, whereas guitarist Salar Rajabnik and bassist Ainjil Emme stretch the outro into one thing extra explosive than its recorded counterpart.
Slower materials comparable to “Cool Buzz” and “Swallowtail” conjures a unique form of stress, with Rajabnik coaxing suggestions inches from the amp like he’s tuning a radio sign from one other dimension. Grohl stands in the midst of this, hair clipped up, split-toe black flats, outsized pants — no stage costume or seen armor. When her hiccups threaten to disrupt the session, I present her a trick involving cupping each ears and gulping water, which appears to assist. “This needs to be enjoyable!,” she says later about listening to her songs come alive in a room like this. “It shouldn’t be like dragging your self right down to the studio to rehearse with the band. If that’s you, you’ve misplaced the plot.”
Final 12 months, when these songs had been nonetheless forming with the help of Kim Gordon/Charli xcx producer Justin Raisen, the thought of placing them into the world was summary. What started as one thing unfastened and exploratory, from a budding musician who’s been writing songs since early adolescence, immediately carried weight. Folks would hear this, interpret it, perhaps misunderstand it. That stress hasn’t fully disappeared, however Grohl is rolling with it.
Now, within the thick of rehearsals and early press, she describes the expertise as equal components exhilarating and unnerving — a rush of latest faces, conversations and expectations. A “journey,” she admits, catching herself mid-cliché, however not backing away from it. “I’ve been surrounded by music my complete life, nevertheless it was by no means one thing that was pushed upon me – like, that is what we do, or that is what I do, and you must do it too. Everybody in my household loves going to concert events, taking part in music within the automotive, shopping for CDs and vinyl and making playlists. It has at all times been proper in entrance of me or round me.”
Nonetheless, the velocity of all of it is a part of what makes Be Candy to Me really feel distinct. The report didn’t gestate over years of tinkering with demos. As an alternative, it got here collectively virtually improbably shortly as soon as collaborators like Raisen entered the image after Gordon gushed about him to Dave Grohl, who in flip steered his daughter give Raisen a name. What had beforehand been a extra solitary, perfectionist course of thus opened up into one thing fluid and communal.
“We talked for every week or two at first nearly music,” Violet remembers. “We finally frolicked in his dwelling studio, which is the place we recorded the album. We talked about our influences and who our idols are, what sort of music we’re into in the intervening time and what we wish to make collectively. We spent six hours there and the power was so good. We had been like, properly, okay, let’s begin subsequent week. On the primary day, we did ‘THUM.’”
Grohl talks about that shift with a way of aid. As an alternative of chasing an elusive very best on her personal, she discovered herself in a room the place concepts bounced, overlapped and sometimes materialized earlier than anybody had absolutely articulated them. Earworms like “Bug within the Cake” and the whiplash-inducing rocker “Typically Others” emerged from that power — typically from absolutely shaped instincts and infrequently from a single picture or phrase that expanded outward.
That ethos carries instantly into the stay setup, which Grohl is bringing to phases all over the world by way of the tip of the 12 months. Highlights embrace the U.Okay.’s Studying and Leeds festivals in late August and units at extra fall U.S. gatherings comparable to Chicago’s Riot Fest, Atlanta’s Shaky Knees, New York’s CBGB Pageant and All Issues Go in Columbia, Md. In late Noember and early December, she’ll open 5 exhibits in European arenas for beabadoobee — the largest of her profession.
“We’ve been taking part in with all of the pedal sounds and adjusting tones to get the best sonics,” she says. Despite the fact that the band solely is aware of 5 songs in the intervening time, she’s already enthusiastic about pacing for her present – the best way to steadiness the extra aggressive tracks with the slower, heavier ones, the best way to create an arc with out giving an excessive amount of away from a still-unreleased album. Later, they’ll start incorporating a number of idiosyncratic covers, from short-lived however titanically influential ’80s punk bands comparable to Squirrel Bait to a subversive pop music by the ever-shapeshifting cult duo Ween, plus three post-Be Candy to Me new songs that would seem on a future launch.
For all of the speak of lineage, Be Candy to Me is essentially about carving out house not in opposition to her household identify, however exterior of it. That’s as a result of Grohl doesn’t reject the place she comes from. She’s open about how formative it’s been to develop up round music and take up it virtually by osmosis, whereas additionally studying what it means to construct one thing that lasts. However she’s clear that none of that replaces the necessity to determine her personal voice.
That’s why the sound of the report wasn’t reverse-engineered from a guidelines of influences. Moderately, it emerged organically from what everybody within the room was listening to and responding to in actual time – traditional ’90s various a la the Breeders, the soul-piercing vocalizations of the Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler and the fast, spazzy kick drum sound of recent industrial steel. Grohl additionally indulged her love of late filmmaker David Lynch when writing the shimmering, gorgeously sung “What’s Heaven With out You,” launched as a non-album single originally of 2026.
Speaking to her now, it’s hanging how her relationship to the fabric has developed even months after recording. Songs that after felt summary have taken on extra outlined meanings, she says. Others have shifted fully. She describes revisiting lyrics for the album’s vinyl urgent and discovering new interpretations embedded inside them – concepts about consumerism, id and the seek for one thing extra human beneath the floor.
“We always have folks telling us the best way to suppose, the best way to really feel, the best way to be, what to purchase, what to do,” she says in reference to the music “Cellular Star.” “You’re doing this, however no, you actually needs to be doing this. You actually can purchase this as a substitute. The place is the humanity in any of it? The place is the aim? There’s a lot extra to residing and experiencing pleasure than simply these small dopamine hits.”
That strategy extends to how she thinks about efficiency. Having already skilled each extremes – large phases like London’s Wembley Stadium at a 2022 memorial for late Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins, and intimate L.A. membership settings along with her dad as a part of Greg Kurstin’s annual Hanukkah Periods – she’s conscious of what will get gained and misplaced at every scale. “In small golf equipment, you possibly can see the expressions on folks’s faces. I can learn lips, so after they speak to one another, I can see what they’re saying,” she says. “It’s this very weak and actually intimate, intense expertise, nevertheless it’s so rewarding as a result of there’s no technique to not be linked in that second”
Again within the rehearsal house, the band slams by way of “Bug within the Cake,” a music that, like a lot of the album, blends the non-public and the surreal (it’s each a couple of Halloween get together Violet threw after shifting into her late grandma’s dwelling and a separate incident when she thought a ghost was messing along with her bed room TV set). After they end, Lopez grins and declares, “That felt fairly good, you guys!” For all of the expectations, comparisons and inevitable narratives that may connect themselves to Grohl, what’s taking place in that room is disarmingly simple: a gaggle of musicians, locked in, chasing a sense.
“This album may be very collaborative and it’s not collaborative in a ‘right here’s everyone working for one particular person’ approach,” she presents. “It’s ‘right here’s everyone working for the better good of all of us’ as a result of we’re all very enthusiastic about it. I would like folks to understand the band dynamic of it — that this was made by a bunch of particular person folks that every one actually care about not solely music however the devices they’re taking part in. The place can they assist uplift a music? What components can they add to make it the very best, coolest, prettiest or saddest factor it may be? I simply love making music with my mates.”
