Michigan musicians know how to spin gold from the crush of their homeland’s winter, and the Flint-born Greet Death are a part of that fine tradition. The potent, heavy shoegaze-inflected sound of their second release, New Hell, made it a go-to record for when the chill in the fall air turns into winter’s cold. Last year, I embraced the winter solstice, seeing the band play live to a full house, and it was mesmerizing watching the band plow through most of that record and “Same But Different Now”, which was newly released at the time. Into this tumultuous summer comes Die in Love, Greet Death’s first full-length in six years, and it is a surprisingly hopeful record about love and death, as its title suggests.
You might be tempted to leave Die in Love on your “to listen later” playlist until you need to pull out your hoodie based on this description, but that would be a mistake. This is the perfect soundtrack for the summer wind-down. Summer’s end can seem like a time to lament, but like a funeral for a person who has embraced living, it can be a celebration of time well spent.
Die in Love was self-produced, and where New Hell had a chilliness that worked for that song cycle, there is a warmth to the sound of this record that invites the listener in. While the scene landscape has changed since New Hell, with many more groups incorporating shoegaze influences into their work, Greet Death were doing it before and are still doing it better.
The title track opens the record with a towering squall of thick guitars and introduces the thematic concerns that will dominate the runtime. You can hear touchstones like My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins, and Galaxie 500, but Greet Death’s reframing of touchstone sounds sets them apart. While “Same But Different Now” is a bit of a sonic outlier, its insistent pace and breathless conclusion, punctuated by Logan Gaval’s anguished screams, make it one of the group’s best songs, showing off their range as the song builds from an insistent pace to a thrilling, noisy conclusion.
We are all going to die, and so are all the people we love, but we choose to step into that love knowing pain is inextricably yoked to it. A death surrounded by loved ones is the best we can hope for, whether we choose to think about it or not, and these eight songs explore that central idea as a celebration of the moments that make up our lives, vivid observations of everyday life, giving even those inconsequential moments of life a quiet dignity.
Logan Gaval and Harper Boyhtari, Greet Death’s two lyricists, mix the mundane details of everyday life with observations that made my eyes water, sometimes from their beauty and sometimes because they felt like a gut punch. They complement each other beautifully. Gaval’s lyrics have a dark romanticism. “Small Town Cemetery” is a call to be buried next to a loved one in the titular place. “Motherfucker” burns with a desperation for a lover who never shows. He shines brightest on “Red Rocket”, which opens with a nod to the Stooges and gets darker from there, blending sex, submission, and ritual into an intoxicating swirl.
One of the best examples of Boyhtari’s lyrical strengths is “Emptiness Is Everywhere”, a beautifully observed track about attending a funeral and the attendant feelings. The line “Love is so much losing, how does anybody cope?” In “Country Girl”, arguably the highlight, Boyhtari effortlessly blends references to John Carpenter films and mid-Michigan into a compelling narrative as a blistering solo punctuates the dreaminess.
The closer “Love Me When You Leave” is populated with snapshots of characters in the verses, punctuated by the haunting thesis “If it’s you first, will you love me when you leave?” Perhaps not intended, but I couldn’t help but get an image in my head of the signature moment in Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece, Magnolia, where the characters are all singing Aimee Mann’s tearjerker “Wise Up”.
Die in Love is even better than its masterful predecessor. Hopefully, it won’t be another six years before we hear from them again, but it will surely be worth it if we do. Die in Love is destined to be a go-to for when the pain of life needs balance with some hope, and that is a year-round need.