Riffs, Rust, and Reprises

They started at a kitchen table that smelled faintly of coffee and late-night resolve; two figures leaning into a phone’s tinny microphone, trading terrible recordings until one stubborn riff refused to stay terrible. That small, domestic scene is the origin myth Violet Palms keeps returning to: a lamp, a chipped mug, a guitar leaning against a chair. For Ben Feiner and Marcus Truschinski the table is less a prop than a proving ground; a compressed time capsule where a single chord, a line of melody, or a tossed-off rhythm can reorder everything that follows.

By Design And Accidental, their new record, is the album that grew out of those late hours. If their debut was built on the impulse of “don’t think about it too much,” this one arrives with a different instruction: “maybe think about it a little.” That small shift, from happy flailing to intentional craft, is the axis on which the record turns. Ben still trusts the kitchen-table accident. But now he also sits down to write solos, to shape a riff until it settles into a hook; Marcus still lets character and story steer the lyrics, but the band has learned to lean into arrangements the way a theater troupe leans into timing. The result is music that keeps its slipperiness and softens into workmanship.

Violet Palms is, sonically, a hybrid: early-2000s staccato and sheen refracted through modern rock heft and a funk-minded pocket. When you listen you hear The Strokes’ trim urgency rubbing up against Wilco’s emotional elasticity and the elastic grooves of The Meters. But influences here are scaffolding, not costume. A china-cymbal trick on “True Love Counterfeit” (Michael Mertens’s tiny, defining decoration), proves the point: the band preserves accidents because they give songs their identity. Michael’s percussive punctuation was an anecdote at first; on the record it becomes lodestar.

The band’s chemistry is quiet and democratic. Ben brings the riffs; Craig Benzine, who many know for his online persona and long musical history with Ben, answers with tasteful second-guitar lines that rarely elbow the primary idea. “I’m not too precious about what Craig does,” Ben admits; the space between their guitars is where the record’s muscle lives. Tim Gittings’s bass locks into the grooves with a funk-rooted patience, and Marcus delivers lyrics that read like vignettes: tender, wry, sometimes awkwardly honest. The players arrive with coffee and charts and the sort of mutual trust that makes live takes feel like a single breathe held and released.

That live-breath approach is more than romantic posture; it’s a production philosophy. The band recorded the basic tracks at Blast House in a single whirlwind weekend, playing full-band live takes to trap the electricity of a room with people in it. They left “mistakes” in because the mistakes were life; a verse chord that didn’t resolve the way a player intended, a lyrical stumble that became texture, a syncopation that only gained its meaning after hearing it against Craig’s part. Later, in Ben’s Black and White Pets studio, they returned to overdubs with a kinder clock: more time to coax vocal nuances, to add guest parts that needed comfort and patience. It’s a two-room strategy; capture the live moment quickly, then deepen it slowly in a place where the band are friends as much as clients. That balance animates the record’s tension between spontaneity and craft.

“Late to the Party” is one of the album’s moral centers: a groove-forward song that wrestles, unflinchingly, with addiction and the messy, ambiguous labor of helping friends. Ben, who wrote through a recent period of sobriety, doesn’t dress the subject in melodrama; he lets the groove carry the confession. Marcus sees the band’s role as the practice of presence rather than the performance of solutions: to observe without grandstanding, to stand with someone without pretending to fix them. The song’s power comes from that ethical dissonance; a bright, danceable rhythm carrying an interior ache.

Where heavier material exists, they offset it with playfulness. The band is not sanctimonious about affect: jokes, stage banter, and the pleasure of being ridiculous live alongside moments of real emotional risk. That attitude comes in part from background: Tim and Marcus perform classical theater each season, an apprenticeship in voice, timing, and the breathing of an audience. It shows when Marcus tells a story inside a lyric or when a band member improvises a line that changes the temperature of a whole section. Theater has given them discipline; the kitchen table gave them reckless permission. Both are necessary.

Craig Benzine’s public profile could have turned the band into an internet spectacle, but instead it’s treated like another instrument: present when useful, invisible when the song needs intimacy. Fans recognize him in public and sometimes bring an extra body to shows, but onstage he’s as likely to clown as he is to hold a harmony. That humility helps the band keep its local feel even as its audience widens. Their sold-out Spring Green debut, a tipping point that made the project feel real, taught them the modest lesson that their work could be shared without losing its private energy. The money in the tips was less a windfall than proof: people wanted what they were making.

Arrangement-wise, they are more deliberate now. Ben says he spent hours writing solos he might once have left to spontaneity; Tim arrived with a clearer set of tone goals, swapping amps and instruments until the basslines cut exactly where the song wanted them to. Recording engineer decisions reflected those priorities: vintage-sounding tape simulators here, a shabby Radio Shack mic there; subtle sonic dirt that hints at basements and borrowed equipment rather than studio sterility. The motif is consistent: texture without pretense.

Sequencing the album also became a chore of dramaturgy. The band’s love of formats, from the idea of A and B sides to a mixtape flow, informed the fifteen-song order and the soft reprise of “Marigold” that closes the record like a lullaby. They think in setlists and vinyl sides. They want an album to feel like a night out: peaks and valleys, a touch of surprise, and a final exhale.

And then there are the small percussion moments that refuse to be trimmed. Michael points to pauses that catch at the end of “TLC,” hi-hat tic-tacs that start “Marigold,” and the exact feel of a sixteen-note tail in “Inevitable.” Minor, technical choices become emotional markers; the band’s patience with these micro-decisions is evidence of their new maxim. The accidents are welcomed but the craft binds them into a narrative.

What Violet Palms have made, ultimately, is modest and specific: an album that is equal parts memory and invitation. They want listeners to arrive with maps already in hand; a longing for a parking lot kiss, the memory of a bandage friendship, the comfort of an old church roof, and to leave with the permission to reframe those maps as richer, stranger things. Ben hopes people will say later, “those guys are really good.” Marcus wants songs that move a person to laugh or cry, sometimes both at once. Tim wants the live shows to feel like communal weather; Craig jokes about Grammy speeches and then returns to the practical: get people out to shows in places where Spring Green’s magic can’t be bottled.

As for next steps, their ambitions are careful. Touring and release cycles loom; a push to play rooms where a one-off jam becomes a communal ritual, but none of them talk about instant fame. They want to be remembered for songs that matter in the small rooms and the big nights, for shows that make a person’s week feel like it bent toward something better. Ten years from now, they’d settle for the sentence they can live with: “They wrote good songs. They were great live. They were fun to see.” It’s a modest epitaph, but one learned from kitchen-table nights and early morning studio panic: make something true, play it with friends, leave some space for the audience to arrive.

In the end, Violet Palms have turned a table into a practice. By Design And Accidental is not a manifesto against happy mistakes; it’s a report on what happens when you let those accidents breathe long enough to learn from them. The record keeps the rickety charm of the first riff and the patient insistence of focused craft. It invites you to sit across that lamp-lit table, lean in, and listen as a small moment becomes, through deliberate attention, a song that’s finally worth remembering.