When the news came last year that Palm were disbanding after 12 years of activity—and on the heels of what was arguably the beloved Philadelphia math-rock quartet’s best work to date—it came as a blow, even if they had outlived the prescribed life cycle of many indie-rock bands several times over. But it didn’t take long for Palm members Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt, plus Nicks and Grazes producer Matt Anderegg, to make their comeback. The trio had been putting out music as Kassie Krut since 2020, but their October single “Reckless” was a formal reintroduction, announcing itself with a sing-and-spell hook that became the band’s calling card and rallying cry. Their self-titled debut EP preserves traces of what made Palm great, but it also reveals what they were, just maybe, always meant to do: make dance bangers.
On Nicks and Grazes, Palm piled their aerobic rhythms high with junkyard scrap drums and Alpert and Kurt’s chantlike harmonies, which at times could sound uncannily like Animal Collective’s Panda Bear and Avey Tare. Kassie Krut strips almost all of that away. The beats remain, more mechanical than before, as does Alpert’s voice, though here it becomes a robotic cipher, accompanied not by Kurt but (as on “Reckless”) what sounds like a male text-to-speech bot. Sometimes, Alpert is just another texture in the mix; on the shuddering, immense rager “Hooh Beat,” razor-sharp sawtooth synthesizers slice her words into their individual phonemes and morphemes. “United” is Alpert’s most surprising turn, because she comes across neither menacing nor aloof, instead delivering her lines in the hypnotic, sing-songy patter of a children’s nursery rhyme. It’s a love song (Kurt and Alpert are recently married) that perfectly captures the way infatuation can strike you dumb to the point of Dadaism.
While Kassie Krut is in many ways an exercise in minimalism—“We challenged ourselves to write a song with one bass note, one drum beat and just a couple simple chords,” the trio originally said of “Reckless”—traces of Palm’s proggier inclinations still shine through. Winding ribbons of zither-like guitar open and close “United,” and “Racing Man” pulls a magic trick where the bass pulses sound at first like they’re on the offbeat, forcing you to recalibrate your inner metronome in real time. At just over a minute, “Espresso” is the EP’s shortest and least essential track, a deconstructed noise experiment that more closely resembles the music of Arca circa Mutant or one of the interstitials from SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. Kassie Krut are clearly thinking about their project as mind music as much as for the body.
