Greta Van Fleet have always been builders of dreams. They build them out of amplifiers and old ghosts, out of the ringing iron of the guitar, the great cathedral cry of Josh Kiszka’s voice, Sam Kiszka’s rolling bass and Danny Wagner’s drums arriving like weather over a dark plain. Since From the Fires, they have been constructing their particular house in the wilderness: part Led Zeppelin temple, part American highway, part adolescent dream of what rock and roll ought to be when nobody is looking. Palace for the People, their fourth full-length album, is the largest of those dreams yet.
The record arrives after three years of Starcatcher, touring and the strange education of becoming adults in public. The four musicians stepped away from the road before making it, retreating into Tennessee to write and record without the usual machinery of touring, interviews and expectation pressing against the windows. They worked with producer Mike Elizondo at his studio near Nashville, eventually cutting the record in roughly four weeks. The material came from unfinished demos, half-written songs and new compositions that appeared during the sessions.
There is something alive about the record that might not have survived a more bureaucratic birth.
The opening, “Into the Beginning,” establishes the architecture. Then comes “Tear It Down,” and the title becomes a command. Have no fear, they are not abandoning their old language. They are smashing holes in its walls.
“Tear It Down” is one of the album’s great pleasures: a heavy, muscular riff carrying a lyric that feels less interested in nostalgia than in breaking through it. This is a band that has spent years being told what it sounds like. Now it sounds as if they have decided to answer by becoming louder.
Then there is “Play Your Games,” one of the clearest statements of the band’s new confidence. It has the swagger that first made them impossible to ignore, but there is more air around it now. The young men who once seemed to be chasing the ghosts of 1970s rock have become sufficiently experienced to understand that ghosts are most useful when you stop trying to impersonate them.
“Saw You Stand” may be the most revealing song of the lot. It begins with restraint, almost delicately, before expanding into the sort of enormous rock ballad Greta Van Fleet can now execute with their eyes closed. Josh Kiszka’s voice rises above it, still capable of that astonishing high-register cry, but there is less desperation in it than there once was. The singer has learned something about silence.
Greta Van Fleet have learned to breathe.
The record’s ambition becomes more interesting when it moves away from the familiar blues-rock vocabulary. “Lost in the Golden” uses Middle Eastern tonal colours to create something strange and almost hallucinatory. “Tough Again”—one of the record’s strongest pieces—combines wistful vocals, enormous drums and sweeping strings in a way that recalls classic-rock grandeur without merely photocopying it.
Elsewhere the band brings in instruments and textures that would have seemed unlikely on the Greta Van Fleet of 2017: brass, strings, a cimbasso, shehnai, unusual percussion and influences drawn from Qawwali, Sufi music, Indian traditions and Eastern European folk. The intention isn’t to dress rock music up in exotic clothing. The intention is to let the outside world into the room.
This is where Mike Elizondo proves a particularly interesting collaborator.
His production history is all over the musical map—rock, hip-hop, R&B, pop—and that seems to have appealed to a band that wanted someone who could understand the architecture of a Greta Van Fleet song without being frightened by the possibility of knocking down a wall. The band has described his studio and working method as unusually organized and intentional, while emphasizing his musicianship and his willingness to engage with them creatively rather than simply polish what they brought in.
The result is not a reinvention.
It is something more difficult.
It is evolution without betrayal.
Palace for the People takes pieces from all four previous eras of the band and puts them in the same house. There is the old blues-rock muscle. There is the psychedelic haze. There is the progressive appetite. There are the ballads. There are the great vocal peaks. But there is also the influence of everywhere these four musicians have been.
They went out into the world and came back changed. That is the album’s central idea.
They are capable of grandeur almost by reflex, and occasionally that grandeur threatens to become the point rather than the means. Their musical vocabulary remains rooted deeply in classic rock, and no amount of additional percussion or exotic instrumentation changes the fact that the Kiszka brothers and Wagner still speak most fluently through the language of the great British and American rock bands of the past.
But perhaps the mistake is to demand that they become something they are not. Rock and roll has always stolen.
The blues stole. Zeppelin stole. The Stones stole. Punk stole. Metal stole. Hip-hop stole everything it could reach.
The crime is not borrowing. The crime is having nothing of your own to say. Greta Van Fleet have something of their own to say now.
They want the music to bring people together. They want the giant room to belong to everybody inside it. They want the old instruments to remain alive without becoming museum pieces. They want the guitar to sound dangerous again. And, perhaps most importantly, they want young people to believe that rock music can still be a place to go.
Not saviours. Not revivalists. Not the reincarnation of Led Zeppelin.
Something more useful. A bridge.
They are standing between the enormous history of rock and whatever comes next, waving an electric guitar like a lantern and Palace for the People is their most convincing attempt yet to illuminate both sides.
And when “Born into This” finally closes the door, the feeling is not that the palace has been completed. It is that the builders have left the lights on.
The night is still there.
The amplifiers are still warm.
Somewhere, behind the walls, the drums are still breathing.
And the door is open.
Donnie’s Rating: 8.5/10
Palace for the People is out on 9th October
