Palmyra

After years of DIY touring, self-releasing music, and building a grassroots following one show at a time, Palmyra is finally feeling some momentum behind it. With the release of their full-length debut album Restless, the Virginia-based band—Sasha Landon, Manoa Bell, and Teddy Chipouras—has stepped into a new chapter powered by a strong team, a clearer identity, and a sound that feels fully their own.

In our latest interview, we sat down with the full band to hear more about Palmyra's journey to date—including the role of mentors like Illiterate Light, the serendipity of Newport Folk Festival, and the creative leap they took with Restless.

Analogue: I stumbled onto the music via Spotify that just suddenly played “Arizona” after a different artist’s album had finished. I was hooked. Is that common for you guys to hear that fans found you in that sort of way?

Teddy Chipouras: It’s kind of a new thing for us to be discovered like that. In the past, we were just a touring band for the last four-plus years. Pretty much everything up until this point has been word-of-mouth. We self-released all of our stuff until Restless, and now we have this amazing team behind us helping get the music out. It’s cool to hear—we don’t hear it often—that the algorithm, the deadly algorithm, is actually feeding our music to listeners. That’s really new for us.

Analogue: You mentioned having a team behind you now. It feels like maybe you're finally at a level you’ve wanted to reach for a while—like your music and your dreams are now getting the muscle and resources they deserve. Does that resonate with you?

Mānoa Bell: I think a lot of the push to build a team came from the advice of our role models—other bands we looked up to. One in particular is Illiterate Light, a Virginia band we started off as big fans of and now are close friends with. They told us how getting a booking agent, a manager, a label—all of that—really helped create momentum. That was always kind of the goal. And with Restless, we just felt like the music was at a place that deserved that snowball effect. So we tried to gather all the right pieces for a proper release.

Sasha Landon: One more nod to Illiterate Light: they brought us to Newport Folk Festival a few years ago. They run this thing called the Bike Stage, which is powered entirely by solar panels and bicycles. It’s cool. That put us in front of people we wouldn’t have reached otherwise. It kind of thrust us into an industry pressure cooker—thanks to our friends. And now, we’ve got a team and a label of friends who knew us first because of that Newport Folk moment.

Analogue: Yeah, Newport’s a pretty important portal for a lot of artists. It signals something. You mentioned Illiterate Light—didn’t you open for them at one point? How did that relationship start?

Sasha: I remember our first tour ever. We were living in Boston and drove down to Harrisonburg, Virginia, where they live and where the three of us met. We just asked if we could hang out and asked them a million questions. It was our first hang with Jeff and Jake, and we basically grilled them—“How do we do this? What did you do?” They were so helpful and still are. We’ve toured with them and opened for them. I think our first tour together was in September of 2022. We've also played a lot of one-off shows and festivals with them.

Analogue: Earlier, Mānoa said something about how your music finally feels like it deserves this push. Sasha, you nodded when he said that—it seemed like a shared sentiment. Can you unpack that a bit? What does that say about your relationship with the music you made before this?

Mānoa: We’ve always loved the music we made before now. But like every band in the early years, we were figuring things out—replicating what we loved and experimenting with styles. It felt responsive, like a reaction to what we were listening to. But with Restless, it felt like we found our own voice. We felt confident in our identity as a band. This music felt unique to us.

Teddy: Yeah, and like I said earlier, we’ve been touring as Palmyra since the beginning. Our first couple of releases were like, “Let’s hop into the studio for two days and make an EP so we have something to sell at shows.” Restless was the first time we went in with a lot of time and intention. We set out to make something that felt like Palmyra. We spent a lot of time and money on it, and we were like, “Alright, this is the one to push.”

Analogue: What were those conversations like when you say you had a clear idea for the album? What was discussed?

Sasha: We had a lot of songs and wanted to create a cohesive project. The three of us talked about investing everything—time, energy, whatever it took—to properly record a studio album. We worked with my friend Danny Gibney, who engineered and co-produced the record. He plays in Dogwood Tales with Jake Cochran from Illiterate Light, who also played drums and co-produced. They helped us narrow down from 20-something songs to the 10 on the record.

We had two earlier projects—Belladonna and Shenandoah—that felt true to who we were at the time, but not like cohesive albums. With Restless, we wanted to make something we’d be proud of forever.

Analogue: Was there a song that changed the game for you? One that felt like a turning point?

Mānoa: Probably the title track, “Restless.” That song came together really fast. The arrangement felt super natural, and it immediately became a staple in our live set. That doesn’t usually happen. It became this core identity piece for the show and for the band. It also helped inform how we approached other songs.

Analogue: Was that a cornerstone that you built the other tracks on?

Teddy: I don’t know that we consciously said, “This is the cornerstone,” but I think we all felt it. That song had this new sound—grit, edge, aggression. It felt like a real statement. And yeah, we definitely chased that sound while making the album.

Analogue: What’s the genesis of that song?

Sasha: I started writing it. Usually, one of us will bring a song to the group and we’ll arrange it together. I actually found my early demo of it yesterday—it sounds way different from the final version. A lot of this record is about growing up and doing the thing you want to do, which is what we get to do every day. We're really lucky, but it also kicks your butt. Touring all the time, losing money, being exhausted—it takes a toll. I was living in a house with people I didn’t know very well and felt really dysregulated, mentally and emotionally. Writing helped me make sense of it. That’s how “Restless” started. A lot of the record touches on that theme.

Analogue: Do you remember the first time you played that live? Could you tell it was something different?

Mānoa: Yeah, it was in Roanoke, Virginia. Our first big theater show. We’d been off the road for a month or two after the holidays, and all three of us were living in Virginia again. We had this big show coming up and decided we’d debut six or seven new songs. We arranged “Restless” acoustically in my backyard and then took it into rehearsals—our first time ever playing with a drummer. That show was probably the beginning of the whole Restless process. A lot of those songs were played for the first time that night.

Analogue: That had to be exhilarating.

Mānoa: Definitely. There was press there, we had a green room—we’d never had anything like that before. Hundreds of tickets were sold. It felt like a new chapter.

Teddy: [Laughs] I remember being so nervous. Like, “Are we even ready to play for 200 people? What are we doing?”

Analogue: Since we’re talking about shows, what’s coming up next for you guys? I see festivals on the calendar, and a New York date coming up?

Sasha Yeah! We just wrapped our Restless release tour, which was our first proper headline tour. It was awesome. One of our first shows back is opening for The Backseat Lovers at a Gov Ball afterparty. They're one of our favorite bands—Waiting to Spill really inspired a lot of Restless—so we’re super pumped. That’s gonna be a big one.

We’ve also got Winnetka Folk Fest, outside of Chicago. A lot of our friends are playing that one. Then Iron Blossom here in Richmond. We’re also getting ready to announce some summer house show dates.

Teddy: Yeah. We’ll be busy. Lots of shows this summer for sure.

VISIT: Palmyra