Greta Van Fleet have released a new single, Age Of Machine, and announced their second album The Battle at Garden’s Gate. It'll be released on April 16 next year.
The band have also launched a website to coincide with the single release, ageofmachine.com, which hosts an audio stream of the song and features a series of strange photos from what we're presuming is a video shoot.
The band have also released the cover of the album (see below), while an incomplete tracklist featuring four named songs appears on Amazon: as well as Age Of Machine and My Way, Soon, which was released in October, there's opener Heat Above – which has been part of the band's set since 2016 but didn't feature on debut album Anthem of the Peaceful Army – and Broken Bells.
Age Of Machine is something of an epic, clocking in at around the seven-minute mark, and while the song does possess a certain The Rain Song-style sweep, it's definitely another step away from that 'Baby Led Zeppelin' tag. And we're not sure Robert Plant could ever ululate like Josh Kiszka does during the intro.
If you're thinking that album title sounds a little churchy, well, that's deliberate. "There are definitely Biblical references,” Josh tells Rolling Stone. “Not just in the title, but throughout the entire album.
"This is a world with the ancient civilisations in it, just like our own parallel universe, really. It’s an analogy. Each song is a theme. A magnification of different cultures and civilisations inside of this world searching for some kind of salvation or enlightenment."
"We realised that whilst growing up, we had been shielded by many things and we were unaware of a lot of things," says drummer Danny Wagner. "And then we were thrown out into this huge world, and it was a bit of a culture shock at first. But as we started to travel a lot, meet new and different people and experience different cultures, our definition of 'normal' changed."
"I suppose that everything has changed except what got us here in the first place," adds bassist Sam Kiszka. "Everything – our perception of the world, perception of life itself, what it means to be an artist, what it means to be part of a beautiful, gorgeous society. We've gained a larger understanding of why we're all here."
The Battle at Garden’s Gate is available to pre-order now.
