Not just ‘baby Mastodon’: The resilient sonic fury of Atlanta’s Palaces

In the increasingly distant days of the early 2010s, I knew them. They rehearsed next door to my band while a BDSM nightclub world of leather, whips and chains throbbed away overhead. While my group was busy with stoner metal, our neighbors in Palaces were sculpting their signature cacophonic onslaught of visceral screams and impenetrable walls of sound. It was a nice hard rock yin-yang while it lasted. 

Now, more years later than I care to contemplate, my hardcore colleagues are still going strong, and their latest LP, Sunhunting, is another foray into the demonic sub-basement of their collective unconscious. I had the opportunity to sit down with Palaces ahead of their July 17 show at the 529 venue in East Atlanta Village, with supporting performances by Woorms and the Tom Cheshire Band.

Sonically speaking, Sunhunting delivers the signature Palaces wallop: a brutal, apocalyptic wilderness where biomechanical horrors devour their prey with a bloodthirsty repast intercut by only the occasional passage of exotic melodicism. It’s a massively furious affair consistent with the band’s past work, and one that guitarist/vocalist Steven Lee McLaughlin says is born out of the mundane frustrations of modern life.

“Most of the music that was written for this album, on my part, was [about] me trying to get a home for my family, literally being able to afford buying a house,” he explains. “Whether I was being literal or metaphorical, a lot of the stuff that I was writing about was homelessness and how fucked up that is — the struggle of attempting to get your own place.” Dismal as those sentiments may be, he emphasizes that there are hopeful underpinnings to the raging lyrics “I feel like I have to say comes out angry otherwise I don’t feel like I’m getting my point across.” 

Bassist/vocalist Jeremy Weeks is quick to echo the sentiment that the album is meant to address life consternation with an eye toward a hopeful future. “Other than that,” he continues, “we’re talking about space age kinda shit or castle ruins. Whether that’s all going to be used as allegory or metaphor is for the listener to take in and decide.” 

“It’s easy to doom out and get really bummed,” adds drummer Jonathan Balsamo. “You get those emotions out listening to angry music. It sounds counterintuitive, but I always feel much more relaxed after a hard day if I blast out some aggressive ass tunes. That goes for playing that type of music, too. That feeling after playing a show of elated exhaustion.”

Drums for the album were recorded at West End Studios, with the majority of the remaining recording and production happening at the home studio of Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher, who took an interest in the band after hearing them at rehearsal.

“He’s been a fan for a little while,” explains guitarist/vocalist Eric Searle. The project would be Kelliher’s first release as a producer. 

The band bears an undeniable similarity to Kelliher’s main project, and the genre-ambiguous Palaces is fine with that. “We don’t have a genre or a subgenre or anything to fall into,” says McLaughlin. “So a lot of people just equate us to being ‘baby Mastodon’ at the moment, which is totally fine.”

“We’ve always kind of been an anti-genre band,” adds Balsamo. “I’ve always been proud of this band, not saying we’re any particular sub-thing. We just are who we are.”

All of that genre-bending aggression coalesces around a theme that’s all too familiar to Atlanta-based artists of all varieties: maintaining the professional artist life in a city that seems actively hostile to it. “A lot of the big Atlanta practice spaces are gone to gentrification,” laments Balsamo. “In my time playing music in this city, I’ve seen a lot of venues come and go, and a lot of practice spaces come and go. It’s tragic when that happens, but you find out who’s really serious and committed to doing this and who’s not.”

“The city does not give a shit about the arts,” says Weeks bluntly. “They barely care about businesses.” That said, he remains optimistic about the long-term resilience of creatives like those in his band. “As long as people like us and many others keep making it wherever we can, it’s going to survive. We’re like leeches — you can’t kill us.”

From a musical standpoint, Palaces attributes that enduring quality to ongoing support from local die-hard venues — the 529, Eyedrum, the Earl and Star Bar outstanding among them. “Fortunately, we still have some good things in Atlanta that haven’t fallen to gentrification,” says Balsamo. With Sunhunting, Palaces demonstrates that sometimes such an unfallen spirit is carried onward with the most visceral fury sonically possible. 

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.