FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: We Are Moving the Needle
the surname to a pretty well-known Grohl but, rather than this being the daughter of Dave Grohl following in her father’s footsteps or getting a leg-up by association – as many will call it nepotism -, this is a teen artist who has her own career on her own terms. Indeed, she does have creative parents and a father who has been a stalwart of the music scene for decades now. However, this is a singular and already distinct and talented artist that is making her own way and will release her debut album, Be Sweet to Me, on 29th May. Violet Grohl is incredible, so I wanted to spotlight her. She also turns twenty on 15th April, so that is going to be another reason to celebrate her here. There are some features and interviews I want to get to. You can pre-order Be Sweet to Me. Grohl plays Reading & Leeds in August, though I hope there are more intimate gigs in the U.K., as she is developing a fanbase here. I am going to end with a new interview from The Forty-Five. They spent time with a compelling and passionate artist whose debut album is primed to be among the best and most notable of 2026. Let’s start with her interview with Far Out Magazine, where Violet Grohl discussed her five major influences:
“It is no surprise that Violet Grohl’s first teaser tracks from her upcoming debut album are so good. When you’ve grown up with a rock star dad and a director mum, surrounded by the greatest talents in the musical world thanks to their social circle, you’re bound to get some great inspiration passed down.
In debates about nepotism, that nuance is often overlooked. Yes, Grohl has connections most people could only dream of. But when it comes to her artistry, what she really inherited was an extraordinary education. Her father is a genuine music obsessive who has witnessed many of the greatest moments in modern music firsthand. Growing up with him meant being surrounded by incredible music, hearing endless stories and recommendations, and having someone able to guide her toward the very best of it all.
In Far Out’s conversation with Grohl, that point comes up quickly as she reflects on the huge influence of simply driving around with her father. From the passenger seat throughout her childhood, she discovered many of her favourite albums and films. It became the ultimate starting point for her own musical journey, and she ran with it.
But now, age 19 and prepping to release her own debut album, Grohl is out there on her own, merging those life-long influences with new ones she’s gathered along the way as she forged her own passion and built her own artistic world”
The Breeders – ‘Last Splash’
Grohl makes no secret of the immense influence the 1990s have had on her. Obviously, she wasn’t there as she was born in 2006, but naturally, the soundtrack of her childhood came from the records her mum and dad loved from their own youth, forever enamoured with the sound of the ‘90s grunge wave that they were both invested in, either as a musician in Dave Grohl’s case, or a fan in the crowd for her mum, Jordyn Blum.
One of the key acts on repeat was always The Breeders, but it wasn’t until she got a bit older that this second record from the group really hit her. “That album totally opened up a world for me sonically when I listened to it for the first time,” Grohl said, adding, “The way that Kim Deal writes music is so spectacular and just so enjoyable to listen to. It’s so frenetic and high energy and also really beautiful at the same time.”
‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ (David Lynch, 1993)
“When you come, I’ll be waitin’,” Grohl repeats on her single ‘595’ like the voice of Laura Palmer, haunted by the spectre of BOB in her final days.
Since her teenage years, when she first saw Blue Velvet, the world of David Lynch has always been important to her. But for this record especially, it was the dark, devastating and eerie world of the Twin Peaks prequel movie that kept coming back to her.
“There were lots of moments when we were recording where scenes in that movie would just pop up in my head and or there would be a line from the movie that was just so spot on to what I was trying to say that we would throw it in there just as kind of a little nod to him,” she said, treating her music as a kind of sonic tribute to Lynch, adding, “There’s something so beautiful and dark and emotional about his work that I just I relate to very deeply.”
The state of Virginia
While Grohl was born and raised in Los Angeles, her ancestral home of Virginia always had a draw to her. While Dave Grohl is mostly associated with Washington, the majority of his young life was lived in Virginia, and for all of Violet’s youth, trips to her grandparents’ house always felt like a hyper-inspirational step back in time.
“I love Virginia, and I feel so connected to it,” she said, adding, “My dad grew up there, and I used to go to his childhood home all the time and spend time with my grandma there, and her house is, it’s basically left exactly as it was when my dad was like, growing up there.”
As a young girl, only really coming to realise that perhaps her dad was a person of note, looking at the bits and bobs at her grandparents’ place felt like a gateway to something, as she said, “There’s just so many little bits and pieces of memorabilia and of moments in time that are so special and beautiful”.
Her grandma
In a similar vein, it wasn’t just the house that felt inspiring, but the woman who kept it, too.
“I think both of my grandmas, my dad’s mom and my mom’s mom have both been just like massive inspirations for me my whole life,” she said, honouring her family. “As a person, in art, in school, in whatever field it was that I needed support in. They were always there to support me. Always are there to support me,” she added, highlighting that the influence of her family goes way beyond her dad.
“They’re so wise and beautifully articulate, and that’s just like everything that I could ever aspire to be, and having them raise me was really, really, really special,” she gushed as a beautiful tribute”.
PJ Harvey at Glastonbury
When you’re a kid at arguably the world’s greatest festival, the experience is bound to be formative. When you’re 16 and performing at that festival as part of your dad’s secret set, that’s also bound to be a highlight. But for Grohl and her many experiences of attending Glastonbury, nothing was quite as impactful as in 2024 when she was in the crowd watching PJ Harvey’s set on the Pyramid Stage.
“Marina Abramovic came out and did a silent meditation piece at the beginning, I think it was ten minutes, but it was just the most, like, beautiful emotional roller coaster,” she said as the set started powerful and stayed that way. “There were moments where my sister and I would look at each other and we’d have tears in her eyes, and then the next song would play, and it would be like a fucking amazing rock song, and we’d be jamming out,” she said of the experience.
To Grohl, it was everything she could’ve wanted: “It was just like she had perfectly encapsulated her essence into that live show, and it was so spectacular”.
It is worth moving along to Kerrang!. Great to see her getting some love and attention in the U.K. press. Here, Violet Grohl talks about “finding the confidence to go it alone, how her late grandmother Virginia is still a “massive presence” in her life, and if there’ll be UK shows”. I cannot wait for the release of Be Sweet to Me. Although I love all the details about recording the album and working with producer Justin Raisen, it is her connection with her grandmother . This interview was published in March, and Grohl was asked at the end whether there will be U.K. shows, to which she answered, “You might hear something soon…”, so we may get some confirmed venue dates for fans who want to see her here:
“Your initial songwriting efforts were solitary but became more collaborative in the studio. Was that something you pushed for, to take you out of your comfort zone?
“Yeah, that was something I wanted. After a while of writing on my own, I started to get emotionally drained, as I was pulling from some very memorable places. That put me into a zone it wasn’t really easy to get out of, so it was fun to be in a spontaneous environment and really beautiful. A lot of stuff happens in those moments that you don’t really expect. Sometimes it might go wrong, but other times something even better comes out of trying. THUM was written and recorded the first day we were in the studio – I thought, ‘I didn’t even know I could do that.’ I had a lot of unfinished demos, so I hadn’t finished my own song before. It all fell together and lit a fire under my ass.”
You have your grandmother’s portrait tattooed on your arm. You’ve also written a song, Bug In A Cake, about living in her house now, and her continued presence there…
“She was such a massive presence, and when she passed it was really devastating. But her presence on earth was so strong and so vibrant that it feels like she’s still here and I feel very close to her all the time. Moving into her house was all I wanted to do. The thought of it being torn down and turned into some developmental property broke my fucking heart, so I couldn’t let that happen. Last year, I officially moved in. My grandmother had kept the most amazing family heirlooms, like my great grandpa’s World War II dogtags, and all the letters he wrote to my great grandma when he was serving in the navy. The song Bug In A Cake is about how the house is haunted, because my grandmother is still very much there. There’s a lyric, ‘Turn the TV off so it turns back on,’ about when I came home and despite switching everything off, the TV was on in the bedroom, with MSNBC on, which was my grandmother’s favourite channel.”
What qualities did Justin bring as a producer? Given your relative inexperience, what were you looking for from him?
“We both had the same feel for what we wanted to do. He’s pretty hands-on – he’d hop on the bass when he needed to – and wrote the bassline for THUM. He’s not overbearing – he has so much going on in his brain constantly and is like a mad scientist. It was very collaborative, and everyone was willing to listen.”
Let’s talk about a few of the artists on those playlists and what qualities you were trying to emulate from them – starting with Soundgarden…
“Their guitar sound is so sludgy and so powerful. I love it because it can be angry one moment and very emotionally heavy the next. And I just love the melodic structures of Soundgarden songs. Plus, there is no man who can sing like Chris Cornell. I’ve never heard a guy do a good cover of a Soundgarden song – only women.”
What about the Pixies? You seem to share a predilection for surreal lyrics with Frank Black…
“Absolutely! I love how abstract his lyrics can be, but somehow beautiful and depressing. It feels like unfiltered expression of exactly what he wants to say, which is so fucking badass. Plus, their guitar sound and backwards drumming are so iconic and inventive.”
And what about PJ Harvey?
“PJ Harvey is just something else… the way that she’s able to translate her emotions in extraordinary ways, and her sonic choices are so tasteful and spectacular, and never obvious. I think I was 12 or 13 when I got my first PJ Harvey record, [1993’s] Rid Of Me, and it blew my fucking mind!”.
I want to end with this new interview from The Forty-Five, as the photoshoot (photos are by Milly Cope) is incredible and we get this fascinating portrait of a young artist about to release her debut album. Such an incredible time for Violet Grohl, she has this affinity for London. That bodes well for potential shows here. The Forty-Five sat down with Grohl to discuss a debut album that could (and probably will) rival some of the greats from the '90s. I don’t want to include the entire interview, though there are selections that I was eager to highlight:
“In person, Violet is sweet and polite, gushing about how much she loves London (“the architecture! The big grassy fields!”). She has her mother, actor and director Jordyn Blum’s piercing blue eyes that well up as she talks about her love of music.
But the rest is all Grohl. And not just her dad – familial influence dating back to her paternal grandparents, who set in motion a love of music that would shape the generations that followed. There’s not a hint of precociousness to her, nor is she a wallflower. She chats away freely and enthusiastically about the process of making her debut record. Not shying away from her lineage, Grohl’s debut is steeped in 90s influences. Be it the dream-pop of Cocteau Twins on ‘Pool Of My Dreams’ or the DC hardcore-indebted ‘Cool Buzz’, it’s a record that says: I know who I am and I’m proud of it.
Enrolled in the school of rock from birth, morning trips to school in the San Fernando Valley were soundtracked by the 90s alt-rock canon of PJ Harvey, The Muffs and Juliana Hatfield and the experimental sounds of Bjork. Picking up a ukulele and, latterly, guitar, Violet taught herself to play music and write poetry. Aided by a voice that can belt out a gravelly rock song with the same conviction as a jazz standard, and perhaps, a debut album was always an inevitability.
By thirteen, around the time when most of us were discovering Nirvana, Violet was playing with them. At a one-off LA reunion show (only the fourth time the band had publicly linked up since Kurt Cobain’s passing) she joined Krist Novoselic, Pat Smear and Dave Grohl on stage. And despite the familiarity, the weight of the occasion wasn’t lost on her.
Though many of her early musical experiences were utterly atypical, Violet was still a teenage girl, growing up in an age where another teenage girl was making serious waves.
PHOTO CREDIT: Milly Cope
“I’ve been following Billie Eilish since the beginning – like, since her SoundCloud days,” Violet admits. “I love her. She’s a lovely person. Watching her open up this path for female musicians in this alternative pop space that’s still beautiful, it was just so incredible to me. I watched her play live a handful of times in 2018 and it was just insane.” She recalls a moment side of stage at Camp Flog Gnaw, when Eilish’s dad handed her his ear set so she could listen to Billie’s isolated vocals. “I was crying so hard the whole time, because it was so raw and so beautiful. And I was just like, this is all I want to do. It totally lit a fire under my ass.”
Turning painful experiences into art was something Violet discovered at a young age. “When I’m in an emotionally vulnerable place, or I’m very sensitive, I’m more open.’ she explains. “There’s something about it that puts me in this perfect temperature where it’s the sweet spot to finding stuff that resonates very deeply with me, I guess. “Making this album, I was definitely unpacking a lot of past pain and stuff that was going on in my life. But it just came out the way it came out. I wasn’t looking for feel, particularly.”
That seismic emotional shift is felt most prominently moving from track six, ‘Mobile Star’; an Eilish-indebted shoegaze track inspired by Ian Curtis’ death and “the pressure to be a certain way” into ‘Often Others’ – the record’s heaviest song: a sludge anthem with doom-laden, droning guitars. “There’s so much emotion behind a sludgy guitar,” she shares of the artistic choice. “It feels like a gut punch.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Milly Cope
On ‘Cool Buzz’, Grohl prods at the hypocrisy of men in the hardcore scene, who pretend to be progressive but still don’t welcome women into their spaces.
“It still feels like an exclusive scene,” laments Grohl. “Especially when you wanna listen to really hardcore shit and run around and mosh, there’s a lot of ‘Oh, you’re too delicate, you’re too feminine, this isn’t your place,’ she sighs. “ But I do wanna be in that space and I know there are a lot of other girls who want to be there too. So I think more girls should make punk music, if these spaces aren’t gonna allow it.”
At nineteen, Violet seems to have a lot worked out already And most importantly, she’s made a record that should go a long way to silence those claiming she’s only here because of her last name. “I’m beyond grateful and for the life that I was born into,” she says, fully tapped into the discourse. “It’s such a privilege to be able to be around musicians and in a space that nurtures my interest and allows me to grow and to make a record.
“Obviously, doors are open for me because of my last name,” she eye-rolls. “It’s not something I’m ever going to hide behind or say, ‘No, I worked so hard for this! You guys shouldn’t say that! That hurts my feelings.’ I don’t care – I really don’t. I’ve heard that since I was 13 years old. So call me a Nepo Baby all you want. It’s whatever to me. I just hope that eventually people will give me a shot.”
This summer, Grohl will play Reading and Leeds festival for the first time, just like Nirvana did thirty-five years ago. A smattering of UK shows is also on the cards. As her team prepares to whisk her off to Paris for a run of European press, she ends our conversation with a request – or perhaps a challenge – for the naysayers.
“Come see me live,” she urges. “Come listen to my music and then you can decide for yourself if I’m worthy of this career or not.”
She pauses, those big blue eyes glistening a little. “This is my passion, this is my thing – and it’s all I want to do”.
Violet Grohl celebrates her twentieth birthday on 15th April. On 29th May, her debut album, Be Sweet to Me, arrives. She has some huge festival dates in the U.K. later in the summer, but it seems like we may get some news before then of extra dates. From there, it really will be full steam aged. An artist who will be hugely in demand and will scoop a load of ecstatic reviews for her debut album, make sure you connect with Violet Grohl. This is a brilliant and instantly engaging and lovable artist and person who…
YOU truly need in your life.
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