Interview: Greet Death
Photo by Jake Morse
New Low is the latest release from Michigan rock band Greet Death, which dropped on June 25 via Deathwish Inc. A follow up to 2019’s LP New Hell, the five-track EP finds the band continuing to tinker with its signature blend of depressing lyrics and layered, shoegazey soundscapes. Vinyl editions of New Low will be available on August 26 and can be pre-ordered here. Currently, Greet Death is on tour with Foxing and will be playing at the Roxy in Los Angeles on August 6. Before going on tour, the band’s vocalist and guitarist Sam Boyhtari chatted with Good Album Friday about influences, Spotify loot, and making content beyond music.
The band’s been dropping singles since 2021, and now the New Low EP is finally out. How did that EP come together?
The original idea was to cold drop this EP probably last year, like in March 2021. We just wanted to write these five songs and put them out digitally. But we had to kind of compromise on that because the label wanted to do the whole thing with vinyl and production time is so long right now. We ended up doing the staggered release instead, which at the time, I know I was disappointed about because we just wanted new music out now. But I actually think we’re all pretty happy with what we did because it gave us a bunch of releases over the course of six or seven months, and then we still have a new EP with vinyl for people to get and something in between that and the next record.
Who were some of your influences when you were first starting out?
Definitely pop punk shit, like Green Day and Blink 182. We liked Metallica and the Dead Kennedys, too. A lot of our early time together was covering songs by those bands and getting a feel for what playing music was like, and then writing our own shitty pop punk songs about high school. Because who doesn’t do that when they’re into pop punk? Then your tastes hopefully evolve. All that stuff is still something we hold very fondly and that we still listen back on. The dynamic that Logan and I have—he has songs and I have songs—that’s directly from Blink 182, like the Mark songs and the Tom songs. I don’t think it was ever a conscious discussion. It was just how it always went.
The band’s music videos look like they were fun to make and very DIY. What was that process like?
Yeah, we had a lot of fun. Those were kind of Logan’s babies. He did most of the directing in that. We had our friend David take his VHS and do all the filming. We did both those in a day, which I don’t ever want to do two music videos in one day again…Logan had the concept for both of those. We kind of worked together on “I Hate Everything” because we didn’t really have that much of an idea of what we were going to do. We kind of had to figure it out on the fly. “Your Love Is Alcohol” was his kind of storyline. So I thought that was really cool.
I see the artwork for New Hell hanging behind you. Who designed that?
Yeah, those are the prints back there. That’s our friend Liam Rush, who is from Michigan. He’s from the Detroit area. We didn’t really know what we were going to do for art, but Logan knew that it was going to be some kind of Hieronymus Bosch style hellscape mural, painting type thing. Logan had pitched that idea to Liam and then one day we were on a tour and Liam just sent that without warning us that he had even been working on it. And we were like, ‘Oh, what, like this is it.’ He killed that. And that’s why I have the prints, because I love them. He’s a very talented artist.
Who are you listening to now?
The new Soccer Mommy record just came out—that’s a pretty good record. Logan said he was listening to the new Tim Heidecker record—I listened to it last night and I liked that. He’s a comedian but he makes music too, and it’s pretty cool. I’ve been getting back into Pavement pretty heavy. I’ve been working in a kitchen the past couple months just in between tours and the chef loves ’90s rock like Pavement and Silver Jews. We’ve been listening to that Purple Mountains record a lot. Elliott Smith is a big influence these days, especially on the stuff that Logan does. We take our Spotify discover playlist pretty seriously. Him much more than me, but I started doing that too. If you find a couple of new songs for your ‘liked’ songs, it’s kind of like you got the loot, you know? You got the cash. We do a monthly playlist through the Greet Death Spotify and I usually have the least to contribute. Lately I’ve had a little more to contribute, which is good, but those guys tend to out-listen me on a lot of stuff. Faye Webster is cool.
When can we expect the next record?
I think after this Foxing tour, we’ve got to take some time for ourselves and just take a break…Most of the songs are done, we just have to get together and record it. We’ve got some recording equipment to take on this tour and I think we’re going to try to demo it in hotel rooms and at the sound checks. The songs we’re playing now, we’ve been playing already for probably a couple years, so people have heard some of them. My hope is that we can get it out next year. I can’t promise that because I don’t know. But that would be cool. I’m always anxious about waiting too long to put something out.
There’s a collection of vlogs on the Greet Death YouTube channel documenting tour life. Are these made for the fans or just yourselves to look back on?
It’s more of a tour diary. It’s for us and for anybody that is interested in seeing that aspect of what we do. I think we have become interested in the multimedia possibilities of what we can do together—not just with the music—but just with us as people. The response to that’s been cool. It’s kind of a window into what it’s like on the road and for us specifically, and how isolating it can be, but also how random and funny and exhausting. I guess we wanted to do it because you see tour documentaries, but you don’t really see too many continuous vlogs of people chronicling a whole tour. So we thought that would be cool to try to do and see if people care about that. Or even if they don’t, it’s there for us to watch back. We just shoot a bunch of clips on our phones and then Jackie edits them in the van and we put them up. We’re definitely going to keep doing it. It’s fun. We’re just trying to explore more ways of putting out content that’s not just music.