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Josh Kiszka was watching an ice cube rise and fall in his glass at 2 a.m. at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Hollywood last year when he came up with the lyrics to a new song by Greta Van Fleet. The movements of the ice made him think of a favorite philosopher, the late British theologian Alan Watts, who described human existence as a kind of ebb and flow. “This is what I saw in the ice cube,” says Kiszka, 24.
“That’s what Ah Sri Rama Jayam Ram is all about,” he continues, citing the mantra of “Trip the Light Fantastic”, taken from the band’s second album, The battle at Garden’s Gate, released on April 16. The next single, “Age of the Machine”, is released on Friday. “Self-liberation, or this idea of letting go or transcending. Is there life after death? I think I would rather cease to exist. Get a deep sleep or something. Your body returns to Earth, and there grows a tree, and the tree gives off oxygen. It’s just that: we trigger the light in a fantastic way. We are cosmic. “
Growing up in a small town in Michigan, Kiszka immersed herself in spiritualism as almost everyone attended the local Catholic church and roamed around with her grandmother’s camcorder while other children were connected to the internet. . The singer formed Greta Van Fleet in 2012 with her twin, Jake, on guitar and their little brother, Sam, on bass, adding drummer Danny Wagner the following year; by 2017, they had topped rock radio charts with their single “Highway Tune,” whose exhilarating riffs and wild screams set them on course to become one of the biggest new rock bands in recent memory. They have since made headlines with the Red Rocks and won a Grammy Award (for their 2017 EP Fires), and has withstood countless comparisons to Led Zeppelin.
The twin brothers’ merry bidding show through the phone from their Nashville home, making it easy to imagine them locked in their old shared room in Frankenmuth (population of around 5,000), “throwing shit at each other. As Jake says. When Josh mentions that he’s carrying a mustard and gold notebook filled with song lyrics and road memories, Jake retorts that its contents resemble the delusions of “someone who escaped from a mental institution.”
Books, by Rudyard Kipling’s The jungle Book Aldous Huxley’s dystopian visions litter their living room floors – they don’t yet have a library in Nashville. Thematically, these authors are a good indication of The battle at Garden’s Gate, which picks up where 2018 Anthem of the Peaceful Army left with its great mythology and terrible warnings about the state of the world. “There are certainly Bible references,” Josh says. “Not just in the title, but throughout the album… It’s a world with ancient civilizations, just like our own parallel universe, really. It’s an analogy. Each song is a theme. An enlargement of different cultures and civilizations within this world in search of some sort of salvation or enlightenment.
The brothers say they found their first experiences on the road that opened their eyes, exposing them to a larger world than the one they came from. “We didn’t grow up in poverty,” says Josh. “We didn’t see people on the side of the street begging. We haven’t seen people trying to get enough money to survive. Jake recalls an incident in Chile when he saw a member of a place cleaning crew putting partially eaten food in his coat: “You see something like that… I think things like it had an impact on who we are, and certainly who I am. “
On “Tears of Rain”, Josh sings a Scorching Earth awaiting relief; on “The Weight of Dreams”, wealth turns out to be the gold of fools; and on “The Heat Above,” the drums of a looming war come closer. “There are recurring themes in my work. . . constantly there is war, ”says the singer. “Sometimes there’s the idea that it’s for religious reasons, but there’s also the industry – the war industry, I guess. Then there is this idea of when the industry becomes the identity of the company. What will become of humanity? “
The band began work on the album in the summer of 2019, meeting with producer Greg Kurstin in Silver Lake, Los Angeles to record a rare GVF love song, “Light My Love.” Over the remainder of the Southern California sessions at Henson Recording Studios and No Expectations Studio, they ended up with a new sound that takes Greta Van Fleet’s cult classic rock and takes it even higher, with rare radio songs and a track. which extends to over eight minutes of jamming.
“We wanted to do something on the scale of a film score,” says Josh. “We wanted to do this for a long time, but we didn’t think people would be ready.”
He and Jake talk to each other for a while before Josh concludes, “But being in music long enough, there’s more of a relationship we have with people. I think it will help them understand this particular album – because it’s a very sophisticated album. There is no doubt about that. “
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