Greta Van Fleet steps into the dangerous, indulgent, and beautiful world of Starcatcher

AUGUST 1ST 2023 | by EMMA SCHOORS

PHOTO BY NEIL KRUG

Greta Van Fleet has returned with their highly-anticipated fourth studio album Starcatcher, a genre-spanning endeavor soused in vintage flair and occultic exploration.

“Meeting The Master” was fans’ first glimpse into the Michigan-based band’s newest era. Its warm acoustics and vocalist Josh Kiszka’s signature howl first appeared in the last three shows of the band’s Dreams In Gold tour, and it finally made the leap to streaming platforms on April 9 with an accompanying music video. “Sacred The Thread” followed just over a month later, harking back to Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” and its reverse-echo drum intro. The record’s third single, “Farewell For Now,” called upon harmonic sweetness and buttery guitar tones, and “The Falling Sky” felt much like a From The Fires deluxe track. What the record in full would feel like was largely unknown, but one thing was certain: it would be a step the band couldn’t take back, for better or for worse.

“There is a blistering element to the thing that is raw and unencumbered by any opinion and then there’s the softer, more philosophical element,” Josh told Billboard about the record’s lyrical focus in a recent interview. “I’m getting at ideas that were both personal and about humanity’s relationship with the cosmos, in the way that we’re all a by-product of space dust… carbon.” Acrobatic and accessible in equal measure, it acts as a full-bodied jump into the unknown. The record’s cover is simple as can be, a bright white screen only interrupted by the title, which leaves something to the imagination conceptually. “It has this dangerous beauty about it. It’s almost indulgent, and sometimes we decided to push so far out, while knowing that we can always pull back if we want to. But we would regret it if we didn’t go all the way to see what that is.”

Zoning in on lead guitarist Jake Kiszka’s influences, “king of the slide guitar” Elmore James meets the psychadelia of Eric Clapton and boogie-woogie blues of John Lee Hooker. He pulls inspiration from Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, and has cited Jimmy Page as another major source of sonic solace. “I went through a year of really intensely studying what Page did,” he told Rolling Stone in 2018, “to the point where I knew how he thought.” Bassist and brother Sam Kiszka’s favorites aren’t far off; while browsing records for The LP Spree that same year, he picked up a live Neil Young record and said it was “like crack to look at.” He’s got a thing for the CSNY crew, because not a minute later he said he’s spent “over 1,000 hours” listening to Stephen Stills’ first two solo records. 

Drummer Danny Wagner’s approach has both intensified and refined itself this time around. In “Waited All Your Life” he holds a simple beat, but come the chorus he plays around with increasingly intricate drum fills. “Runway Blues” is a fun percussive highpoint, and “Frozen Light” showcases the drummer’s room-filling stylistic richness. In full the record delivers on propelling the band forward, introducing listeners to the resuscitated remains of folk, country, jump blues and more, while inventing new pathways towards unexplored genres.

Greta Van Fleet is still stumping music critics. “What does it all mean? Who knows, but Kiszka and his bandmates seem committed to the idea,” Ultimate Classic Rock pondered in a review of the record. Rolling Stone stumbled through a tired, lazy conclusion: “They still want to be Led Zeppelin.” Those who get it are getting it, but there’s still a subset of people walking the thin line between a satiric and genuine appreciation of the band, for fear of finding something they actually like, and having to admit it. What their ascent to rock royalty has taught the industry is rock is a delicate genre gatekept seemingly valiantly, but when it comes down to it, the gates are held closed in vain. The only way to safeguard the music we all love so much is to allow it to exist presently, not just through some constricting retrospective lens.

Leaning into rock’s predecessors and furthering its modern polishedness, Starcatcher is Greta Van Fleet’s cosmic leap into both the past and future.

Listen to Greta Van Fleet’s new album “Starcatcher” below.