Violet Grohl Finds Her Own Frequency

The two-building compound tucked into an industrial stretch northwest of Los Angeles looks nondescript from the outside, but inside it’s a rock’n’roll nerd’s dream come true. Rooms are full of gear stacked to the ceilings and giant road cases stenciled with the name of one of the world’s biggest rock bands make hallway navigation a challenge. Pop Tart varietals beckon from the kitchen, energy drinks chill in the fridge and two Slayer-branded bottles of Jagermeister personalized to Dave Grohl lay unopened on a table underneath a giant TV.

But Grohl and his Foo Fighters chums are nowhere to be found as they enjoy some vacation time before starting a world tour in support of their new album, My Favorite Toy. So today, the studio’s rehearsal room is being commanded by Dave’s soon-to-be-20-year-old daughter Violet, who is figuring out what it means to front a band. Not theoretically, not someday – right now.

More from Spin:

• Kelsy Karter is Obsessed with Obsession
• The Passions of John Darnielle
• Believe It: The New Rolling Stones Album Is Good 

When I meet her in April, she’s a few weeks out from her first proper full-band set at a record store in Long Beach, and the room feels like a pressure valve mostly loosened. There’s a lot of laughter, as Violet and her best friend Persia (the daughter of new wave icon Gary Numan) rattle off inside jokes in fake British accents. Violet hits her vape pen between songs and asks, “any grandmas in the house?” to nobody in particular. Then the band kicks back in and everything tightens.

The songs from her debut album, Be Sweet to Me, aren’t tentative. They arrive loud, fuzzy and dangerously catchy – built for movement but grounded in something more internal. “THUM” gets things off to a propulsive start, its strutting riff and alternately sweet and salty vocal delivery recalling Songs for the Deaf-era Queens of the Stone Age or even early Foos. On the measured “595,” inspired by a t-shirt advertising a phone sex hotline, drummer Anthony Lopez leans into fills that feel almost overqualified for the room, while guitarist Salar Rajabnik and bassist Ainjil Emme stretch the outro into something more explosive than its recorded counterpart.

Slower material such as “Cool Buzz” and “Swallowtail” conjures a different kind of tension, with Rajabnik coaxing feedback inches from the amp like he’s tuning a radio signal from another dimension. Grohl stands in the middle of this, hair clipped up, split-toe black flats, oversized pants — no stage costume or visible armor. When her hiccups threaten to disrupt the session, I show her a trick involving cupping both ears and gulping water, which seems to help. “This should be fun!,” she says later about hearing her songs come alive in a room like this. “It shouldn’t be like dragging yourself down to the studio to rehearse with the band. If that’s you, you’ve lost the plot.”

Last year, when these songs were still forming with the assistance of Kim Gordon/Charli xcx producer Justin Raisen, the idea of putting them into the world was abstract. What began as something loose and exploratory, from a budding musician who’s been writing songs since early adolescence, suddenly carried weight. People would hear this, interpret it, maybe misunderstand it. That tension hasn’t entirely disappeared, but Grohl is rolling with it.

Now, in the thick of rehearsals and early press, she describes the experience as equal parts exhilarating and unnerving — a rush of new faces, conversations and expectations. A “journey,” she admits, catching herself mid-cliché, but not backing away from it. “I’ve been surrounded by music my whole life, but it was never something that was pushed upon me – like, this is what we do, or this is what I do, and you should do it too. Everyone in my family loves going to concerts, playing music in the car, buying CDs and vinyl and making playlists. It has always been right in front of me or around me.”

Still, the speed of it all is part of what makes Be Sweet to Me feel distinct. The record didn’t gestate over years of tinkering with demos. Instead, it came together almost improbably quickly once collaborators like Raisen entered the picture after Gordon gushed about him to Dave Grohl, who in turn suggested his daughter give Raisen a call. What had previously been a more solitary, perfectionist process thus opened up into something fluid and communal.

“We talked for a week or two at first just about music,” Violet recalls. “We eventually hung out in his home studio, which is where we recorded the album. We talked about our influences and who our idols are, what kind of music we’re into at the moment and what we want to make together. We spent six hours there and the energy was so perfect. We were like, well, ok, let’s start next week. On the first day, we did ‘THUM.’”

Grohl talks about that shift with a sense of relief. Instead of chasing an elusive ideal on her own, she found herself in a room where ideas bounced, overlapped and occasionally materialized before anyone had fully articulated them. Earworms like “Bug in the Cake” and the whiplash-inducing rocker “Often Others” emerged from that energy — sometimes from fully formed instincts and often from a single image or phrase that expanded outward.

That ethos carries directly into the live setup, which Grohl is bringing to stages around the world through the end of the year. Highlights include the U.K.’s Reading and Leeds festivals in late August and sets at additional fall U.S. gatherings such as Chicago’s Riot Fest, Atlanta’s Shaky Knees, New York’s CBGB Festival and All Things Go in Columbia, Md. In late Noember and early December, she’ll open five shows in European arenas for beabadoobee — the biggest of her career.

“We’ve been playing with all the pedal sounds and adjusting tones to get the right sonics,” she says. Even though the band only knows five songs at the moment, she’s already thinking about pacing for her show – how to balance the more aggressive tracks with the slower, heavier ones, how to create an arc without giving too much away from a still-unreleased album. Later, they’ll begin incorporating a host of idiosyncratic covers, from short-lived but titanically influential ’80s punk bands such as Squirrel Bait to a subversive pop song by the ever-shapeshifting cult duo Ween, plus three post-Be Sweet to Me new songs that could appear on a future release.

For all the talk of lineage, Be Sweet to Me is fundamentally about carving out space not in opposition to her family name, but outside of it. That’s because Grohl doesn’t reject where she comes from. She’s open about how formative it’s been to grow up around music and absorb it almost by osmosis, while also learning what it means to build something that lasts. But she’s clear that none of that replaces the need to figure out her own voice.

That’s why the sound of the record wasn’t reverse-engineered from a checklist of influences. Rather, it emerged organically from what everyone in the room was listening to and responding to in real time – classic ’90s alternative a la the Breeders, the soul-piercing vocalizations of the Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler and the rapid, spazzy kick drum sound of modern industrial metal. Grohl also indulged her love of late filmmaker David Lynch when writing the shimmering, gorgeously sung “What’s Heaven Without You,” released as a non-album single at the beginning of 2026.

Talking to her now, it’s striking how her relationship to the material has evolved even months after recording. Songs that once felt abstract have taken on more defined meanings, she says. Others have shifted entirely. She describes revisiting lyrics for the album’s vinyl pressing and discovering new interpretations embedded within them – ideas about consumerism, identity and the search for something more human beneath the surface.

“We constantly have people telling us how to think, how to feel, how to be, what to buy, what to do,” she says in reference to the song “Mobile Star.” “You’re doing this, but no, you really should be doing this. You really should buy this instead. Where is the humanity in any of it? Where is the purpose? There’s so much more to living and experiencing joy than just those small dopamine hits.”

That approach extends to how she thinks about performance. Having already experienced both extremes – massive stages like London’s Wembley Stadium at a 2022 memorial for late Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins, and intimate L.A. club settings with her dad as part of Greg Kurstin’s annual Hanukkah Sessions – she’s aware of what gets gained and lost at each scale. “In small clubs, you can see the expressions on people’s faces. I can read lips, so when they talk to each other, I can see what they’re saying,” she says. “It’s this very vulnerable and really intimate, intense experience, but it’s so rewarding because there’s no way to not be connected in that moment”

Back in the rehearsal space, the band slams through “Bug in the Cake,” a song that, like much of the album, blends the personal and the surreal (it’s both about a Halloween party Violet threw after moving into her late grandma’s home and a separate incident when she thought a ghost was messing with her bedroom TV set). When they finish, Lopez grins and declares, “That felt pretty good, you guys!” For all the expectations, comparisons and inevitable narratives that will attach themselves to Grohl, what’s happening in that room is disarmingly straightforward: a group of musicians, locked in, chasing a feeling.

“This album is very collaborative and it’s not collaborative in a ‘here’s everybody working for one person’ way,” she offers. “It’s ‘here’s everybody working for the greater good of all of us’ because we’re all very passionate about it. I want people to appreciate the band dynamic of it — that this was made by a bunch of individual people that all really care about not only music but the instruments they’re playing. Where can they help uplift a song? What elements can they add to make it the best, coolest, prettiest or saddest thing it can be? I just love making music with my friends.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

The two-building compound tucked into an industrial stretch northwest of Los Angeles looks nondescript from the outside, but inside it’s a rock’n’roll nerd’s dream come true. Rooms are full of gear stacked to the ceilings and giant road cases stenciled with the name of one of the world’s biggest rock bands make hallway navigation a […]Jonathan Cohen{authorlink}https://www.spinmagazine.com/feed/SPINMusic News, Album Reviews, Concert Photos, Videos and Morehttps://static.spinmagazine.com/files/2023/08/cropped-logo-spin-s-340×340.png