“Singin’ love me when you leave”.
The history of modern music is littered with love stories that transcend the art of music. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw ruled the world of 90s country. Beyonce and Jay-Z have endured challenges of marital affairs, culminating in some of the most lauded music of the 21st century.
However, not all couples like Hill and McGraw create music that expresses enduring love. In the case of Greet Death, the inverse is the forefront, including in name.
Logan Gaval and Harper Boyhtari, Greet Death’s founders, have a tale as powerful as few others, meeting in first grade, and growing together, both as people and musicians. Their music has conveyed an almost telepathic understanding of each other, and how they bring the best out of each other.
Greet Death’s previous works saw the duo sink into the wallows and misery of death, a dive further into life and adulthood, and an inescapable feeling that death was lurking around, whether in front of you, or peeking around a corner. One listen of 2022’s “Punishment Existence” was enough to cement that idea for me. Death is everything to Greet Death. I mean it is in the name.
Now, “Die In Love”, Greet Death’s first full-length project in six years, and first as a five-piece band, is a record that sees the band, somewhat at least, move past the consigned futility of their previous works, and made Die In Love as a “celebration of life”. After having sung about Death their whole careers, they found it thrusted onto their lives, both Gaval and Boyhtari suffered family losses in between albums, and combined with new experiences, lead to the duo having a newer outlook on life.
Of course, a Greet Death record will always have it’s expected musings, the opening title track explores the back and forth rollercoaster of relationships, and the scars it can cause. “Emptiness Is Everywhere” tackles the inevitability of losing family, and the inescapable pain it can and will lead to. But within these tracks, there are little fractions of hope, of desire to keep getting up and living life. The first chorus on Emptiness ends with the line “Emptiness is Everywhere, so hold each other close”. It’s a small detail, and the other choruses are bleaker, but that one line is incredibly poignant and representative of where Greet Death find themselves at. ‘Country Girl’ is a sweeping six-minute tale but is a great showcase for how to utilise repetition, the lyrics just enough to paint the scene and story, but not enough to where you are allowed to colour in the rest of the picture, all set to a simple, but brilliant melody that carries the song.
The album continues in the same stylings of previous Greet Death records, a blend of soft-rock with other tracks that blow into fuzzy shoegaze. However, the songs of a shoegaze styling here are not as doomfully bleak and overwhelming as their previous work, in some cases there’s a meager, yet noticeable lightness to these riffs and how they intertwine in these songs. ‘Motherfucker’ slows down in its middle but slowly picks back up with the pulsating drums and the overlapping vocals, eerily reminiscent to something you’d hear in a Death Cab for Cutie song.
Die In Love closes out with ‘Love Me When You Leave’, a seven-minute soft suite, with each verse discussing a different person and the problems they face. Josie feels nothing about seeing a couple struggling. Katie’s desperate to escape and write her songs. Jamie is implied to have taken his life with the line “it all goes black”. And Taylor’s joke about dying not being sad didn’t make anyone laugh. But there is solace for one person, Katie does get to record that song, and her story ends with her driving away, singing along. Like the first chorus on Emptiness is Everywhere, only one instance is there semblance of a happy conclusion. But in contrast to Greet Death’s previous work, that’s 100% more hope than we’ve seen before.
Die In Love is not an album that welcomes the end. Rather, it questions and looks for the end’s purpose. Where past albums see life as futile, Gaval and Boyhtari now see life to have a purpose. Love and life can still feel tough, but the knowledge that death is lurking means you shouldn’t take anything for granted. You should live on and learn to love.
Greet Death: Die in Love – Out 27 June 2025 (Deathwish Inc)
Death “Country Girl” Official Video
