Nation of Language, Greet Death

Nation of Language

Greet Death

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 faces 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 has found a way to anthemize our suffering, to turn it into one great, big, beautiful singalong: we’re all gonna die, woo!

“Everybody struggles in a roundabout way,” goes the album’s opening lyric. No longer just honing in on their own pain, the band is now using suffering as a jumping-off point, a way to connect, and ultimately love one another. “Emptiness is everywhere, so hold each other close,” Harper sings later on, another of the album’s key lyrics. After years of performing their songs live, the band has seen firsthand how keenly their audience connects to their music. “So I wanted to try to write something less fatalistic, because I feel some kind of responsibility to help,” says Logan.

Prior to recording, Logan had been listening to a lot of The Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work, “because I was trying to figure out how to write a song that wasn’t just depressing,” he says. He and Harper had been talking for a while about the direction of Die In Love; why not a bunch of love songs?” They tried to do just that, but of course, death came creeping in as usual. Die In Love speaks to the most tragic and beautiful scenario possible: dying beside the person you’ve spent your whole life loving. Tragic, because we have to die. Beautiful, because we might be able to do it together.

They recorded the album 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. While Logan takes big, beautiful hits at existence, Harper focuses on small shards. On her songs — ‘Country Girl’, ‘Emptiness Is Everywhere’ and ‘Love Me When You Leave’ — she takes us through DVD viewings of Halloween, buckets at KFC and family gatherings soundtracked by ‘Hotel California,’ “that bullshit Eagles song”. Then, she’ll deliver a Loganism in quick succession, one absolutely devastating lyric that blitzes it all to pieces: “family is everywhere ‘til it’s not there.”

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. “At the end of the day, we’re lucky to lose people we care about,” says Logan.