Greet Death: Die in Love

On Love Me When You Leave, the hushed closing song from Greet Death’s third LP, Die in Love, Harper Boyhtari suggests that “Feelings pass, people fade away / Friends change, problems stay the same”. The song’s central figure, the kind of tarnished soul you’re likely to find in a Hold Steady song, despite the fact the stakes here feel much more perilous and morose.

Greet Death has always flirted with the idea of shuffling off this mortal coil. As their name would suggest, the Flint, Michigan-based band has always been unafraid to face the matter of death head on, and on Die in Love, Greet Death use it as their most vital source of inspiration. Sonically dynamic and thematically harrowing, it’s the album they were destined to make.

While Greet Death’s debut album, Dixieland (2017), was the jolt that alt-rock needed – a concoction of slow-motion shoegaze and grunge dispensed to devastating effects – the band’s follow-up, New Hell (2019), saw the songwriting alliance of Boyhtari and Logan Gaval sunken deeper in gloom. And while elements of that remain throughout Die in Love (the excellent quiet / loud explosiveness of August Underground), with the pair now backed by Jim Versluis, Jackie Kalmink and Eric Beck, Die in Love reaches even greater emotional nadirs.

Sonically, this is Greet Death presenting the last 35 years of rock music in panoramic view. The opening title track, beginning with a dirgy doom grunge reverb reminiscent of The Cranberries’ Zombie, and as Gaval laments, “I just want to die in love and release all my pain”, his delivery is like an echo from the pits of despair. And while Die in Love sees Greet Death remain entrenched in it, they ingeniously juxtapose this dejection with glittering soundscapes that hit like an endorphin rush.

Take the chiming dream-pop of Same But Different Now – a song with galloping vigour devised for road trips. So, too, Red Rocket, which is filled with floaty atmospheres that feel more attuned at altitude than in the abyss. Elsewhere, Boyhtari provides more contrast. Lead single, Country Girl, majestic dream-grunge through the lens of a beautiful nostalgic innocence; the story, pivoting from films starring Kurt Russell, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Myers to liquor stores and KFC.

Then there’s the shimmering, melodic resonance of Emptiness Is Everything. A song that sees Greet Death dragging emo to new corners, with a tale that exposes the anxieties of growing older and seeing people close to you leave this world (“All the people in my life that I hold close / And the few I love so much please don’t let go”). Small Town Cemetery does little to lighten the mood, either. A slow burning, ghostly lament where the protagonist wishes to be buried next to their loved one (“My love’s an ember / When comes the ender / You know I love you / I’m not forever”).

While these moments match the directness of the band’s past (Entertainment and Strange Days), Greet Death blows it wide open with the atmpsheric dirge of Motherfucker. With Gaval and Boyhtari trading verses, it’s Die in Love’s apex moment, beginning with the reckless abandonment seemingly inspired by a passage from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Like always, though, Greet Death add their own thematic trappings (“It’s killing me to stay alive”).

As Motherfucker’s story unfolds, it’s the song’s peripheral figure who parts with Die in Love’s most potent and poignant message: “We all expire from a slow suicide,” they say, and as Boyhtari weaves in crushing metaphors (“We’re erased by the tide / Like silhouettes we return to the night,”), it’s as stirring and provocative as Greet Death has ever been.

While most people spend large parts of their life consumed by existential dread, slowly killing themselves with the thought of their ultimate demise, on Die in Love Greet Death don’t sugar coat it. However, it’s through sheer directness where they miraculously conjure up the kind of catharsis that makes you feel a little more at ease with the inevitable.

Die in Love is out now via Deathwish Inc. Purchase from Bandcamp.