Persimmon is a brand-new, Raleigh-based band, self-described as ambient post-hardcore. The group is driven by a shared goal of building community in the punk scene and sharing emotion that evades words.
The band started out as a duo with partners Taylor Weber as writer and vocalist and Tommy Ellis, a fourth-year studying technology, engineering and design education, as guitarist. Persimmon was born out of the couple’s shared love for music, art and the punk scene.
“I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember,” Weber said. “As I got older, I just started writing poems and stuff like that. I think there was a conversation I remember having with [Tommy]. And I was like ‘What is your ideal life?’ And [they said], ‘Oh, well, in a perfect world, I’d be a guitarist for a band. But I know that’s not going to happen.’ … I guess that’s what planted the seed — just us just joking around and then we’re like, ‘Wait, what if we actually did something serious?’”
After performing at an open mic hosted by Kai Vosberg, a fourth-year studying communication media, the duo joined forces with Vosberg on drums and Soledad Vallejo on bass for a full quartet. Much of the group’s early music has been born serendipitously out of jam sessions during practice.
“Sometimes things just happen,” Ellis said. “Sometimes we just gotta go in, I start riffing on either something I’ve been working on or just some random like thing and then Kai comes up with the drums.”
Weber described a communal intuition and connection that has allowed the band members to work well together.
“We get into a jam session, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I think I have a poem that matches this energy,’” Weber said. “I think all of the songs that we’ve written together as a group of four have all been born out of jam sessions, which is cool. One thing I’m really grateful about is we’re very intuitive with each other. We get on that little brainwave.”
Despite a deep love for the punk scene from Persimmon’s band members, they said there’s a lack of queer and otherwise marginalized voices, particularly in the Raleigh music scene.
“We are definitely a queer punk rock band, and we represent a lot of different marginalized identities,” Vallejo said. “I think that’s really important. It sounds sometimes a little gimmicky, but the reality is, I don’t see a lot of people that look like us — that are like us — doing the type of music that we’re doing. And that’s really important and validating for anybody who feels like they can’t be a part of the scene [that’s] super white-male-dominated.”
That being said, the band appreciates the tight-knit community punk encourages. According to Vallejo, the scene has recently seen a return to simple, no-nonsense show set-ups that emphasize the intimacy and connection of the music.
“The pandemic definitely killed a lot of opportunities for bands to play live, so you saw a lot of bands shift around players and dynamics and genres or even band names locally,” Vallejo said. “I think that now a lot of people are really putting an emphasis on returning to what I think is the root of punk rock, like doing more DIY scenes, and not really [caring] if it’s the best setup or not. It’s like ‘OK, I have a speaker, I have an XLR cable, I have a mic. This is an open mic in my backyard.’ And giving weight and meaning to things like that because that’s really what it is.”
The band hopes to capture the complex emotions and struggles they face in a way only music can.
“Something that I want to get across is that phenomenon which you just can’t really put into words,” Vosberg said. “A big theme in my life has been struggling to express myself and really feel understood. There’s just some things you can’t express [in] words by themselves. We’ll never actually describe what happened in the way that words when combined with music can. I think that feeling that we feel during practice is something that I really want to capture.”
Persimmon performed for the first time as a group of four on Thursday at the Lola’s Coffee House open mic hosted by the Filipino American Student Association and University Libraries. The band has big hopes for the future and is now working toward releasing an EP or album while continuing to perform live when and where they can.
“There’s really special moments where I’m just like ‘Yeah, this is where I’m supposed to be right now,’” Vosberg said. “It’s the sort of thing that you just know.”
