Palms

It’s packed to the rafters with the four members of Palms – Al Grigg, Brendan Walsh, Tom Wallace and Dion Ford – each one looking more chilled-out and sun-baked than the next. The clip for single ‘Bad Apple’ flips the iconic ’90s skate video genre on its head. Instead of the extreme stunts and bone-rattling falls, nonchalant rollerblading and a total lack of skill reign supreme.

Palms’ second album, Crazy Rack, throws up slices of thrash-pop and droves of fuzz imbued with this same irreverent larrikinism. It’s why I’m intrigued by the lyrics of guitarist and vocalist Grigg, which belie the effervescent nature of the music.

“I sort of need to care about wanting to play the song night after night to be able to draw from something to perform it all the time,” he says. “It needs to come from somewhere sort of real, or at least honest. And it’s also cathartic for me, I guess, to get these things off my chest or work through my thoughts.”

Grigg says his writing process begins in a secluded and contemplative environment, fuelled by an organic drive. “Because when I start writing the song anyway I’m on my own in my room, usually playing acoustic guitar, so even the more punkier songs or the more sort of energetic songs all start out just on acoustic guitar. So it’s a very kind of – I guess isolated, personal, and probably kind of introspective sort of place a lot of the songs come from.”

Palms’ music is inherently instinctive. Every wail of the wah pedal and landing blow of the rhythm section is the product of an uplifting collaboration shared with close mates. “It’s like me going and I’m playing with my friends and you put the drumming behind everything and it lifts it up,” Grigg says. “The music is this really joyous thing, an exciting thing and a happy thing.”

It’s a component of the new album that, as Grigg suggests, allows fans to connect with the music on different levels. “So if you want to find the intensity and you want to have this sort of emotional response to the album, then it’s there and you can find it. But if you just want to tap your foot or sing along or jump around, then you can do that as well. It’s all kind of there.”

For Crazy Rack, Palms once again recorded with good friend Owen Penglis (Royal Headache, Straight Arrows), splitting time between Sydney’s Linear studios for live tracking and Penglis’ basement studio, where they pieced together overdubs, vocals and other bits and pieces. It’s the fervent energy of the band and Penglis’ natural feel for production that have injected these new tracks with a propulsive immediacy.

“Owen is definitely a ‘less is more’ kind of guy, so if you can take something away, he will: ‘Instead of having a distortion pedal, let’s just drive the amp harder or just sort of keep everything very simple,’” says Grigg. “If you let a band just sound like themselves, you get a better chance of that band having something sounding idiosyncratic; having something that another band’s not going to have.”

Beyond the familiarity and conceptual clarity offered by Penglis’ recording method, his impressive arsenal of quality vintage gear – everything from reverb units to classic microphones and a hefty reel-to-reel eight-track – helped shape the album’s sonic fabric.

“Owen has this amp, it’s an old Australian brand called Goldentone, and he’s got an amp that sounds like fucking magic,” says Grigg. “It’s all over our record and I’m pretty sure, because Owen just did a bunch of stuff on the Royal Headache album, I’m pretty sure it got a run on that album too. Everyone that plays it is just blown away.”