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.
But when your EP is led by one of the year’s best dance singles, people are going to want to dance to it; luckily, Kassie Krut delivers. “Racing Man” could make a killer addition to a workout playlist, pumping with all the urgency of being “cast out far behind the gallows” (fitting for a year when medieval electronica was in vogue). “Hooh Beat” goes ridiculously hard; “Reckless” has been thoroughly (and appropriately) lauded; and even closing track “Blood”—another love song—finds Alpert so amped up on connection that she’s about to go haywire. With whispers of her and Kurt’s harmonies, along with the bright synth washes that dominated Nicks and Grazes, “Blood” also lays out the two trajectories Kassie Krut can take from here. They can remain a band, a sort of Palm part two, playing the hits. Or, as I hope they will, Alpert, Kurt, and Anderegg can embrace the full capabilities of a new project, and new name, that’s no longer bound by the constraints of indie rock. Then again, let’s consult the opening lines of “Reckless”: “If you ask me who I wanna be…K-A-S-S-I-E K-R-U-T-T-T-T.” It seems pretty clear they’ve made their choice.
