True to the band’s name, death creeps into nearly all of Greet Death’s songs. And yet, through this ever-present certainty, the band finds the absolute core of what it means to be alive.
Since 2011, elementary school friends Logan Gaval and Harper Boyhtari have been writing songs full of big ideas and everyday details. Their music, loud and full of melodic sensibility, draws from shoegaze, doomgaze, and a little-bit-of-everything-gaze, creating an emotionally maximalist palette. Writing separately but playing together (think of them as small-town Michigan’s Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus), they’ve been drawing in a devoted crowd ever since their unexpectedly successful debut Dixieland in 2017, followed by their next-level opus New Hell in 2019. You’d be hard-pressed to find albums with such heart: ones flooded both with full-bloom feelings and the dumb stories we tell ourselves in order to get through the day.
Returning six years later with Die In Love, their third and best album, Greet Death face the great human problem—that we must go on living despite knowing we’re going to die, and loving despite knowing we’re going to lose it all—with great sensitivity, humor, and flourish. With this album, Greet Death have found a way to anthemize our suffering, to turn it into one great, big, beautiful singalong.
Today, the the album’s new single “Country Girl” arrives with a brilliant music video by Chromatone Studios, written + produced by Harper Boyhtari and L Morgan / starring Greet Death‘s Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval. Harper says the song is about “…identity, alienation, and detachment. It’s like trying to solve a murder mystery and finding out you were the killer the whole time.”
Greet Death recorded Die In Love in Harper’s parents’ basement in Davisburg, Michigan, the place where she and Logan spent much of their preteen and adolescent years. They cut their teeth in that basement, learning how to be a band around the time School of Rock came out and inspired in aughts kids a new possible life path. Logan and Harper covered Metallica and Blink-182 and wrote songs about batteries and frozen yogurt. Returning to that basement well over a decade later to record their third album felt like the back-to-basics moment they needed, something that would take the pressure off after years away from the studio.
Ever since they were kids, music has been the primary form of communication for Logan and Harper. Between them, they’re able to mine the absolute essence of everything both through big picture ideas and small vignettes of life. In Logan’s songs we hear the former, and in Harper’s the latter.
Die In Love asks how we can possibly cope with all the inevitable loss we’ll experience in this life. How on Earth can anyone survive it? The point is that none of us do. So, enjoy the bullshit Eagles songs while they last; the cheap beer, the disappointing New Year’s Eve celebrations, the family members and the lovers who choose to stay a little while.
“Pain and loss. Everyone feels it, it’s a very human thing,” says Logan. He continues: “At the end of the day, we’re lucky to lose people we care about.”
Pre-order Die In Love here.
