The Knife Palms‘ debut EP So They Say has entered my rotation recently and, according to stats.fm, has earned 369 minutes of my listening time (so far) in the month it’s been out. But in order to explain why exactly I like Knife Palms so much, I must paint you a picture.
The year is 2014. I am fourteen years old. It’s summer break, but I don’t really get a full break from academics since my mom insisted I take Dual Enrollment classes at my local community college starting the previous year (I would later go on to become a college dropout at age 16 because of the stress – which is another story for another day and another blog). Class is over for the day, and my mom has just dropped me off back home, the strangeness of being the only actual child in a classroom of adults re-learning things from my previous year of high school waning the farther away from campus we got. Once home, I slough off my backpack, change out of my sweaty clothes, and give my dog his requisite rapid-fire head smooches before retreating to my room. I didn’t care about much in those days–certainly not college–but one thing I did care about was The Sims. Yes, this is relevant.
That summer, I spent a lot of time playing my pirated copy of The Sims 2, creating melodramatic storylines for my sims to suffer through, those storylines mostly including extramarital affairs for some reason. I usually played on mute because practically every household in my custom neighborhood had babies in them, and anyone who’s played The Sims 2 will know just how loud and annoying those babies could be. So, to fill the dead air, I listened to music.
At the time, I had an iPhone, and in the days before Apple Music, you either had songs bought on iTunes or the iTunes Radio. I bought maybe 5 or 6 songs on iTunes before realizing you could get music for free if you knew where to look, but when I tired of my collection of ill-gotten mp3s of varying audio quality, I used the iTunes radio to discover new music. By 2014, I had graduated from the very pop-punk Fall Out Boy radio to the slightly pop-punk, more metalcore A Day To Remember radio. It had been a year since Common Courtesy was released, and those tracks were played very often, alongside bands like Chunk! No, Captain Chunk!, We Came As Romans, The Amity Affliction, A Skylit Drive, and Four Year Strong, among many others.
Sounds are a huge driving factor in memories. For me, sounds can transport me back to a specific place and time. For instance, one day, I had to stay late at work to finish a promo or something, and while passing through the breakroom, NBC Nightly News began playing on the TV. I was stopped in my tracks by the intense operatic opening music and Lester Holt’s voice as he read the headlines. Not because of anything he was saying, but because in that moment, I was back home, seated on the aged faux-leather couch in our living room, watching TV. Despite working at a news station, the only time I ever actually sit down and watch the news is when I’m back home, since I don’t even have a TV in my apartment. I don’t go home very often these days, and hearing Lester’s voice and that galloping string intro, I became sad, wondering if I was now at the point in my life where my house has become my parents’ house.
One afternoon last month, as I was sitting on my futon, probably watching a YouTube video, I got a DM from Will Black of Knife Palms telling me how much he enjoyed my work. Being the nosy person I am, I checked out his profile, something I always do when someone follows or DMs me on Instagram, and saw he was a musician. Curious, I hit play on the snippet of the song So They Say and was impressed. I found the rest of the EP on Spotify, connected my phone to my home speakers, and hit play on the first track, Pathogen.
In that moment, I was transported back to sitting at my desk in my lilac-painted bedroom that hot summer in 2014, building new homes for my sims to live in or new cafés for them to engage in their extramarital affairs, looking over my shoulder at my dog dozing on my purple bedsheets as the iTunes radio started playing a Four Year Strong song, and wondering what it would take for me to not have to do Dual Enrollment anymore.
Basically, I was Anton Ego in that one scene from Ratatouille.
That, however, is not the only reason why I like Knife Palms so much. The nostalgia definitely hooked me, for sure, but the songs are genuinely good. They have a catchy, fun, carefree energy that reminds me of those early 2010s pop-punk bops. The refrain “maybe there’s an answer / in shutting up and accepting you don’t know” in Pathogen is an undeniable earworm. And that’s genuinely impressive for a guy doing it all himself. You heard that right: Will plays all instruments in Knife Palms himself, including that jaunty little bongo lick in the intro of Pathogen. Although the sound of So They Say very clearly draws from a specific era, it still feels fresh, new, and not too derivative, greater than the sum of its parts. If I had to compare the music to a feeling, it’s like getting a sip of freshly made lemonade after spending all day riding bikes around the neighborhood as a kid.
Knife Palms came out of pretty much nowhere and immediately impressed me to the degree where I decided I had to interview the Clintonite (or however you call people who live in Clinton – Clintonian?) myself.
The band Four Year Strong has been invoked when describing the musical stylings of Knife Palms, but Will doesn’t want to shoehorn himself into being just one thing. “I draw influences from so… many… places,” he said, “It’d be easy to just condense everything to artists that orbit the genres in which I write, but that’s not the case. For me, referencing songwriting is all about hooks and note progressions, genre really doesn’t matter.” As for bands that have influenced him, “I’ve gotten ideas from everything from $uicideboy$ to contemporary Christian music I’ll hear on the loud-speaker at a gas station. To round it out: I think if I could put Saosin, Four Year Strong, Jimmy Eat World, and Balance and Composure in a blender, I would consider myself mission complete.” He further described his music as driving, melodic, and dumb, though personally I’m not sure about the last one.
The music of Knife Palms has the polished feel of a band that’s been established for years, but according to Will, although the idea for Knife Palms had been brewing for a while, he only recently decided to take the leap. “I guess I’d describe myself more along the lines of ‘dude who plays power chords until something sounds right’. The idea for it started a few years ago. But looking back over that time until now it’s been largely experimental, trying out different styles, guitars, vocal ideas. I don’t think I took anything I wrote seriously until So They Say.”
He mentioned being in bands in the past, starting as a drummer in middle schooler (“a long time ago,” according to him) and picking up guitar and bass during COVID lockdowns, but for this chapter of his music-playing life, he’s more focused on setting his own pace. “I’m at a point in my life where I’m just not interested in being in a band. KP or being a musician is definitely not my identity. At the end of the day I’m a guy who likes rock and roll, sugar free Monster, the beach, and fast cars in that order. I’m never stressing myself to try and keep up with this like it’s a career. I like controlling the pace of it and delivering the outputs that fit it best. So I started just sort of teaching myself how to make it work. [When I started KP], I had been completely uninvolved musically for years, just seemed like a good time to try it out again.” Will is quite literally a one-man band, since aside from all vocals and instrumentals, he records and masters his stuff himself as well.
The 4-track EP So They Say was released on May 14th, just over one month ago, but more music is on the horizon. “Alright so here it goes, and you heard it here first: I’ll be releasing a full-length album called Basement Blood sometime late this fall. A two-song single entitled Flesh Cassette will be out July 19th with both tracks being off the upcoming full-length.” He added, “I’m really excited to get these new songs out.” A snippet of the two-song single was [posted on Instagram] May 31st, and features the addition of brass instruments.
Will added about the songwriting process, “I write and record at a really fast pace. The issues that come with that though are 1) making sure you’re zeroing in on what songs make a solid final product and 2) pacing. I want to release stuff frequently but I don’t want to be having a new EP out every 3 months either. I already have two more EPs almost written and in the chamber, but I’m sure those will shape shift over the next year. Maybe they’ll stay the same or maybe one will morph into a full length for the end of ’25. Who knows?” So, if you’re a certified Knife Palms Enjoyer like I am, you’ll be well-fed in the coming months. And although it’s just Will in KP, some collaboration may be on the table “I have some ideas for cameo vocals that I’d like to be female led. So I might be outsourcing for that at some point.”
When it comes to performing live, that may also be on the horizon. “Shows are something I’d like to get set up at some point this year. A few venues have gotten ahold of me asking about availability, but the live thing is something I’m still practicing on and getting nailed down.” And when those shows do happen, it’ll still be Will as a one-man band. “It’ll be me on the mic with either my bass or the guitar and backing tracks to go with. Oh yeah, you know how there’s the intro in Pathogen with the bongos? Maybe I’ll do that part live one time.” He continued, “I’d like to do plenty of shows in Jackson. All the bands around here I’ve talked with have been extremely nice, so I’d love to get in on something local. I’ve got a good amount of experience playing live but it’s been a while.” One day soon, you might be able to see Knife Palms at your favorite bakery or burger joint.
The Jackson Metro has had an explosion of new bands recently, with Knife Palms joining the ranks of homegrown talent. There’s been a lot to come out of the DIY scene here: black metal, punk, hardcore, shoegaze, indie rock–the list goes on. But to have something that feels like it was made specifically for teenaged me certainly feels great. It just goes to show that, at the risk of driving this phrase into the ground, there really is someone out there to match your freak. Musically, anyway. And it’s yet another story that’s drawing me closer and closer to spending far too much money at Guitar Center or Sweetwater so I can make my own nostalgic jams…but thankfully my bank balance is always there reminding me not to. For now, anyway.
JXN UNDERGROUND 