Greta Van Fleet Reaches New Heights with Third Studio Album Starcatcher
Listening to Greta Van Fleet always feels like entering a trance. With their powerful guitar riffs, dreamlike lyrics, and a sound comparable to Led Zeppelin at its height, Greta Van Fleet have a way of transporting listeners to another plane.
Though typically described as hard rock, blues rock, or prog rock, the band’s studio albums share a similarity with many concept albums from power metal bands – they tell a singular, cohesive story, taking the listener on a journey through a liminal, musical space, and spitting them out the other side feeling like they’ve woken from a dream. Their third studio album, Starcatcher, continues this trend.
Released on the 21st of July, Starcatcher builds on the band’s previous journeys and sound. The band reaches new heights with their songs, which follow a meandering, fantastical storyline. In conversation with Will Richards from NME, drummer Danny Wagner explained how they wanted to create a universe that spanned their career.
“We had this idea that we wanted to tell these stories to build a universe. We wanted to introduce characters and motifs and these ideas that would come about here and there throughout our careers through this world.”
Starcatcher feels like another chapter, another story set in this universe of Greta Van Fleet. The songs weave together seamlessly to tell this story and expand on the lore of their world. Overall, it works.
The only hiccup is ‘Runway Blues’ in the middle of the album. At just over a minute long, it’s also the only song on the album that explicitly mentions real places or cities. Its shortness, coupled with its different sound to the rest of the songs on the album, is enough to be jarring. It pulls you from the carefully curated space that the band has created and drags you momentarily back to the real world. Compared to songs like ‘The Archer’ and ‘Meeting the Master,’ it feels like an intrusion.
Starcatcher is a solid follow up to Greta Van Fleet’s previous studio album, The Battle at Garden’s Gate. With it’s surreal storyline and subtle worldbuilding, Starcatcher is another notch on the belt of Greta Van Fleet’s legacy. Here’s to hoping that future albums will continue to traverse the universe that the band has begun to explore.
Starcatcher is available to stream now.
