If you have to guess what Greet Death‘s songs are about, their name is not exactly a misnomer. But the saying goes “greet death as an old friend,” and that kind of friendship has always been as foundational to the band as any looming sense of darkness or finality. Co-vocalists Logan Gaval and Harper Boyhtari have been friends since elementary school, spending much of their preteen and adolescent years in the same basement in Davisburg, Michigan where they recorded their first album in six years, Die in Love. But while the record was written during a period of profound change and loss, and starts riotously with the title track, much of it sounds relaxed in its melancholy, not quite resigned but strangely comforted by the inevitable embrace – the idea that, “At the end of the day, we’re lucky to lose people we care about,” as Boyhtari said in press materials, a sentiment echoed in Boyhtari’s chorus of, “Emptiness is everywhere, so hold each other close.” Death is everywhere, too, Die in Love suggests – in VHS tapes and small-town cemeteries, silent screams and bullshit Eagles songs, mind-numbing shoegaze and soaring indie rock. It’s not absent even from the record’s most strikingly uplifting moments, which feel, more than anything Greet Death have made in the past, pretty beyond despair.
We caught up with Greet Death’s Harper Boyhtari to talk about cult horror movies, adolescent friendship, the Sundays, and other inspirations behind Die in Love.
Cult horror movies
You list off several of them on ‘Country Girl’. Where did that stream-of-consciousness flow come from?
That verse is about going to a theater in Chicago called the Logan Theater. I was watching a screening of The Thing. It was the first time I saw The Thing, so it’s one of those iconic memories from that point on. I was on a weird one-off date kind of thing, and it just stood out to me. I’m a big horror person, and so is Logan. There are other songs like ‘Red Rocket’, tying romance into this demonic possession type thing, and then ‘August Underground’ itself is a reference to a found footage horror movie. We did a couple music videos on the last album cycle that were horror movies. I just always think it’s fun to take subjects, like a love song or something romantic that you might consider cute or nice and pair it with something disturbing. I thought it was fun to bring all these characters and people in this fever dream.
There are a couple of albums brought up there, Crooked Rain and Push the Sky Away.
I thought it was fun that those phrases, while they are albums, can stand on their own as just ambiguous phrases that sound nice in the song.
Part of what that song reminded me of was the feeling of getting lost in something like old horror movies in a way that speaks to a sense of despondency, of removing yourself or struggling to connect with the world. I was wondering if that’s something you were conscious of as you were writing it.
I’ve definitely gone through periods where I’ve done the same thing, especially around the time I was writing that song. I probably hadn’t put that together, to be honest with you, but there was a solid year where the person I was dating would go to bed, and I would stay up and I would watch two horror movies back to back. I would literally just sit at my computer and watch like a crazy person and just stare at my screen – I would always try to find weird ones that I’d never heard of that could have been terrible, but they could have been sick, right? There was even a time where I would go to bed, and I would lay in bed,put a horror movie on the TV, and listen to music in headphones and have this dual stimuli thing going. So it’s really no surprise that that manifested in the music.
The Sundays
I wondered if they were an inspiration for ‘Emptiness Everywhere’ specifically.
That’s exactly why I included that. The Sundays came up because we were listening to one of their records a lot on a tour several years ago. Specifically ‘Here’s Where the Story Ends’, the melodies in that, we kept listening to that song. That was our tour song. We listened to it a lot because it soars – it’s very sunny, it’s very melancholy. It’s a romantic song. It’s a sad song. I think both Logan and I drew from that, especially me, though. It’s not by any sense of the word a shoegaze song, but it has those dripping, gooey melodies, it’s got a fuzz to it. When I was writing ‘Emptiness Is Everywhere’, I really wanted to do a chorus that soars like that, and to try to do something with my voice that jumps up like that and gets really anthemic and dreamy. I like that song as a reference point for the whole record because it encompasses a lot of what we wanted to do with the record, which was to make it soar a little more and have a little bit more brightness, whether it’s tonally or literal sonics. But to still be very melancholy and bogged down with anxieties.
In the bio, Logan mentioned he’d been listening to Paul McCartney and Beatles in an effort to try and write from a more optimistic place. I was curious if there are other artists that inspired you to write more in the direction of hope.
That’s a good question. I like that Logan mentioned Paul McCartney because specifically, I think of a song like ‘Silly Love Songs’ – I mean, Paul just loved to do the goofy, big band, kitschy, hokey sound. And I think it’s funny to think about that having an influence on what we’re doing, but when you think of an album like Ram, there’s a lot of melancholy on that Paul McCartney record. ‘Backseat of My Car’, the closer on that record, that I listen to that song a lot. Specifically with trying to write more optimistically, I don’t think so, but I know that when we recorded ‘Love Me When You Leave’, we were kind of thinking about it in a Big Thief-y way, where we wanted it to sound really live. I’m not going to say I was thinking about that band when I wrote it, but the performance, I think we were trying to channel some Big Thief energy, some Adrianne Lenker energy. Other musical influences were more about sonics for me.
Family
Part of ‘Emptiness Is Everywhere’ is about my dad losing his best friend, and that struck me. Logan lost his grandma. The loss that Logan endured was very foundational for this record and for him as a person. It maybe framed some of the writing about being with someone until death; what’s gonna happen when the one you love dies? The last song is kind of hoping they will haunt you after, and asking, “If you’re the one that goes before me, will you try to leave me a sign that you’re still around, or you’re okay – just give me something so I’m okay.” ‘Small Town Cemetery’, similar vibe.
Do you find that you and Logan have different perspectives when it comes to dealing with heavier themes?
We’ve talked about it in interviews recently, but Logan was talking about some of the songs from the New Hell era feeling emotionally heavy to sing. I don’t really feel like that because when I get a feeling out and it’s in a song, for me, it’s like, I have a place for this feeling now. It lives there forever, and so singing it for me is almost like a relief. Logan’s got some pretty heavy stuff that he sings about, so I think that can wear on him sometimes, just getting back into that headspace. I think I’m a little better at compartmentalizing it and removing myself.
Kingdom Hearts
Video games are a very foundational part of our friendship, and that game is one that Logan got when it came out. I went over there, and I watched him play that whole game, because that’s what would happen: I would go over to his house when we were kids, and I would watch him play games. I still play that game every other year. It’s a foundational game for a lot of people because that game is such a warm, fuzzy place to spend time, and it’s so wacky with the Disney and Final Fantasy characters. It’s crazy that that game was ever made. But it’s a game about friendship, and it’s the foundation of Logan and my friendship. Die in Love, while it’s a record of love songs, some of those songs are about friendship. ‘Same But Different Now’ talks about falling out with a friend. On ‘Country Girl’, there’s some lines about some childhood friends of mine and Logan’s toward the end. There’s moments where Logan and I are on tour and we’ll joke that we’re in the gummi ship, you know, we’re just flying to the next show. There was a while where we had that Goofy and Donald and Sora as our profile picture on Instagram, which was funny. We are very much a band of friends, and it feels like the record is more about that than ever before.
Adolescent friendship
Logan and I have been friends for a while and we’ve had other friends in our lives that maybe we’re not so close to now, that we’ve had specific fallings out with. And Same But Different Now’ was written six years ago at this point, so things are also different now with some of the people that these songs are about – that wasn’t supposed to be a pun, that was stupid. [laughs] In that song, it’s mourning a loss and expressing some anger and resentment about a changing friendship, a changing situation. Having longtime friends is a weird thing because people change and grow in their own ways. There’s also that line in the last song, “Friends change, problems stay the same” – just still struggling with the same concepts, maybe having trouble growing as a person, or struggling to explain why things change.
There’s actually a song we didn’t use that I don’t think is ever gonna come out, but it was called ‘I Hate My Friends, I Hate Myself’. I’s about early memories of Logan and I’s first show, and another instance of growing apart from a friend, questioning whether or not it’s worth it to have resentment towards people, but also not being able to help it. That’s the ‘Same But Different Now’ vibe. But ‘Country Girl’ has more vignette moments of actually positive memories, with the end of the song being about going to Commerce, Michigan with my sister and hanging out on the lake. We had a couple friends out there we used to spend some time with in high school, and that’s more of a nice memory contrasted with the weirdness and self-loathing of the rest of that song.
Was there a sense of nostalgia or any other way that recording the album in your parents’ basement affected you?
I think we were very comfortable when we recorded because it was in the most familiar place to Logan and I, a place where we had hung out our entire lives. I don’t think we thought about it like that. For us, it was just like, “This will work, and we won’t have to pay money for a studio. And it has a good room where drums are gonna sound okay.” I mean, I think it is fitting. I don’t think we did it because of that, but it was very cozy. And I think in a lot of ways, it is a very cozy record, a cozy-sounding record. When you’re in a new place, especially like a studio – sometimes a studio feels like a doctor’s office. It feels sterile and scary. I just think we were totally relaxed and just gathered in a circle playing songs, and I think that does show.
Given that music very quickly became a thing that your friendship revolved around, I’m curious if there are ways in which to try to prize or focus on your friendship in ways that have little to do with Greet Death.
I think I would like to find more time to do that. It’s hard because Logan and I live in different states now, and we’re very much engrossed in our own things. So a lot of the time, the only time we do come together is to do music. It’s been a weird time the past six years because there was COVID, just a lot of touring and a lot of isolation. I think hopefully, with the writing of the next record – Logan and I have talked about taking writing trips and doing stuff like that. But there has been a lot of living our own separate lives recently. I think maybe one day we’ll find more time to just hang out and go on a trip or something.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
I’ve come back to that book a few times in my life. It’s one of the earlier ghost stories, but it’s really confusing and hard to parse through. It’s also one of those stories that may be about ghosts, but also the ghosts might not actually exist in that story, because there are themes of neglect and abandonment. The discourse around that book that I understand is it is about a haunting, but it’s unclear whether or not there are any ghosts. And I like the ambiguity of that. I like how confusing that is. Especially in a song like ‘Country Girl’, where I’m just trying to make sense of what is going on and looking for reasons as to why I feel so alienated. For some reason, the second verse, about “the shadow of the boy with wings,” that was a line I just wrote, and then the line “turning the screw, I waited on the stairs” – obviously, that’s the reference. And then I riffed on that story a little bit and the idea of seeing something that may or may not be there. That verse also means more to me now than it did at the time because retroactively, I know that there are reasons why I may or may not have been feeling so alienated related to my gender and my identity. But I just thought that was a fun idea to play on, just wandering around this gothic mansion and looking for answers and seeing weird shit, like flora and blood on the walls. It gets a little out there, but at the end of the day, it’s a pretty direct metaphor.
I think it also reframes that final acoustic song, because in a lot of horror movies, that plea – “Give me something to hold onto” – manifests as a kind of haunting. It’s a very common way to explore grief.
I guess in that last song, the spooky, haunting theme actually becomes this very romantic peaceful send-off. That was not intentional, but it is nice that it worked out that way because what I did want that last song to convey was peace, this idea that grief is terrible and it’s awful and there’s so much dread about the end coming – but if the message of the record is something that we’re sticking to, which is the idea that dying in love with someone is the ultimate goal, if that is something to aspire to, then this moment where you have to accept that one of you is going to die: try to find some peace in it and reckon with it.
Was that the last song you wrote for the album?
No. I do this thing where I write closers pretty early on. I feel like I do it really well. I could listen to a record and feel meh about itt, but if the closer is good, I’m going to completely reinterpret the record and be like, “Wait a second.” So, I think I wrote that somewhere in the middle because I couldn’t see the picture of the record yet. And then once I wrote the closer, I was like, “I get it now.”
In the context of what you talked about before, do you believe there’s a peaceful kind of haunting?
I think it’s something to aspire to, and I think, ideally, that’s what we turn our grief into. Ideally, that’s how you come to settle on something. But that’s if you’re fortunate to have closure on things, especially if it’s a faded friendship, maybe things are not resolved. So maybe the last song is also too idyllic. Maybe it’s like, “We strive for this, but is this attainable?” I don’t know. I think it’s a question for different people to consider.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Greet Death’s Die in Love is out now via Deathwish Inc.
