Album Review: Greyhaven - 'Keep It Quiet'
It takes a lot for a band to utterly transcend their beginnings. We wonder what fresh-faced 2013 Greyhaven would make of their current-day selves. The Louisville quartet almost didn’t make it to their second album; Cult America holds up as a bleeding-raw artefact of a young band going hell-for-leather and almost running themselves into the ground, with half the band quitting in the lead-up to successor Empty Black. That album did more than just establish them; it gave them stability, as vocalist Brent Mills and bassist Johnny Muensch were joined by guitarist Nick Spencer and drummer Ethan Spray.
It’s on 2022’s This Bright and Beautiful World and last year’s Stereo Grief EP that the band really spread their wings, but the swings taken on Keep It Quiet suggests they’ve been building up to this for their entire career. Take a little bit of Southern rock, add a dash of frantic metalcore, sprinkle in some eerie atmospherics and texture, and top with achingly personal lyrical vignettes. Oh, and make sure to season the choruses just right, because goddamn do these four know how to write one. Mix that all together and let them cook; the result is an album that pushes and pulls the listener in five different directions at once.
One of the record’s core strengths is that no song truly sounds the same, driven by a ‘go big or go home’ spirit. Lead single ‘Burn A Miracle’ serves as an incredibly effective album thesis statement, with chaos and relative calm existing side by side as Mills puts his heart on display in a much more pointed way than the Empty Black cover art did eight years ago. “It feels like I’m burning alive” he sings, the song about to shoot upward into its rousing chorus. “How does everybody like it?”
Setting up a more nakedly confessional tone—at least to an extent with the album title in mind—that’s further explored throughout the record, it knowingly examines the urge to pour your pain into music. We all know art is hard, and the more personal perspective Mills brings to the record dovetails nicely with his more ambitious vocal approach, whether it’s chasing serenity on ‘Diamond to Diamond’ amid never-ending personal struggle, or delivering throat-shredding invocations above the cacophony of ‘Evening Star/Shatter and Burst’, the record’s two-part opening salvo that introduces a tighter and more polished sound, albeit one that still kicks like a mule due to Will Putney’s production. Bonus points for the musical jumpscare about a minute and a half in; so much for keeping it quiet.
They’ve hardly sanded down their edges; there are simply more dynamics and textures at work, not to mention the sentiments behind songs like ‘Where The Light Leaves Us’ and ‘Satellite In Love’ landing like a gut punch. That willingness to expand on their sound means every song has the desired impact, with weighty examinations of self-destructive tendencies and being haunted by the spectre of depression cutting through the record’s sonic landscape with ease. In a genre as outwardly aggressive as metalcore, there are plenty of ways to show off intensity, even when slowing things down.
Closing track ‘Cemetery Sun’ feels like it’s an exploration of the album in microcosm, anchored by the willingness to obliterate yourself for the people you love. Running parallel to the risks Greyhaven take across these 11 songs, going out with a song about giving it all in life and in love is par for the course for a band who could very well have imploded a decade ago. It’s just as well they stuck it out, because their fourth album feels like a defining statement. A record that deals in secrets and cloaked confessions, Keep It Quiet is worth shouting about.
Words by Gareth O'Malley
