If the result has divided listeners, the singer’s look has pushed things to the limit. On the band’s Saturday Night Live performance last season, Kiszka wore a get-up he designed himself which NPR described as a cross between “a beaded curtain and a yarn bomb”. Even the singer’s stature (at 5ft 6in) has come in for cruel descriptions, causing many a YouTube commenter to compare him to Bilbo the Hobbit.

That mindset goes a long way towards explaining the insular world that shaped the music of the Kiszka brothers who comprise three-fourths of Greta Van Fleet. They include Josh’s fraternal twin Jake, who plays guitar, and their younger brother Sam, on bass. (The sole non-sibling member is their close friend, drummer Danny Wagner.) The musicians’ remove from the modern world also helps explains why their sonic taste falls so far from that of most in their generation, as well as part of why they have drawn so much scorn from contemporary critics. While Greta Van Fleet’s debut album, Anthem of the Peaceful Army, released in 2018, excited enough fans to debut in Billboard’s Top Five, critics treated it like a fresh outbreak of Ebola. Where's the line between being influenced by classic bands and being a copycat of these very bands? Matrix / Runout (Runout side A, var. 5): 187353E1/A2 B0027675-01A MRP1782/B002767501-A JN-H STERLINGMatrix / Runout (Runout side A, var. 4): 187353E1/A2 B0027675-01A MRP1782/B002767501-A JN-H STERLING The young men also absorbed the literature favored by his father, a chemist with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. (Their mother is a science teacher.) “We had a lot of books that maybe children shouldn’t read, by Nietzsche and Sartre,” he said. “It was all very interesting.” At the same time, he recognizes the value of becoming a lightning rod. “If you drop flaming nitrous in someone’s lap, I think they’ll notice” he said. “It’s a sign that we’ve done something to arouse people in some way or other.” Pressed further about the uncommon level of criticism the band has received, Kiszka did allow a trace of ire. “Some people are writing their articles in their mother’s basement and they’re pissed off that we’re doing something,” he said. “If your career is writing negative things about people, I would think you’d have something better to do.”

Matrix / Runout (Runout side B, var. 2): 187353E2/A2 B0027675-01B MRP1782/B002767501-B JN-H STERLING At the same time, the album continues the lyrical bent of their debut. The titles of both sets employ war imagery. “We thought that would be a good through-line because war has been here since the advent of man,” Kiszka said. “There’s always conflict – from wars of religion to wars of industry.” We didn’t really have to force or be intense about writing, because everything that happened was very instinctual,” Jake says. “If anything, the record is our perspective, and sums up where we are as a group and individually as musicians.” Matrix / Runout (Runout side A, var. 2): 187353E1/A2 B0027675-01A MRP1782/B002767501-A JN-H STERLING Kiszka maintains just as blithe an attitude about the endless Zep allusions. “We’ve been honored and flattered to have those comparisons,” he said. “And it’s lovely that Robert Plant would speak so kindly about what we do.”The E.P. stirred both enthusiasm and criticism, as for some GVF were sounding a little too much alike Led Zeppelin. Matrix / Runout (Runout side B, var. 3): 187353E2/A B0027675-01B MRP1782/B002767501-B B20 JN-H STERLING Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge.

Certainly, he has in his approach to singing, which can make Freddie Mercury seem like an introvert. “It just felt natural to me to do something acrobatic with my voice,” Kiszka said. “I wanted to hang from the rafters.” But, “in the end. you don’t give a shit. You abandon fear because it only hinders you as a performer.” Josh Kiszka’s high and mighty voice – which, at full screech, can sound like an ejaculating hyena – has come in for special grilling. NPR balked at his “grating, maximalist pitchiness”, while the Times called his voice scratchy and shrill.The fact that some consider the result bombastic doesn’t faze him. “I can get on board with that,” he said. The singer accepts that his own visual presentation can raise eyebrows. “A grown man in a jumpsuit screaming,” he said with a laugh. “What is he thinking? Someone once said to us, ‘I can’t think of anybody else who can get up there, dressed like that and get away with it.” The band took multiple concepts from critically acclaimed second album The Battle at Garden’s Gate and brought them into Starcatcher, although Sam’s take on the new record’s big ideas hint instead at new beginnings. “When I imagine the world of Starcatcher, I think of the cosmos,” he says. “It makes me ask a lot of questions, like ‘Where did we come from?’ or ‘What are we doing here?’ But it’s also questions like, ‘What is this consciousness that we have, and where did it come from?’” In fact, it’s not clear that he has. In an interview last year with Australia’s Network Ten, Plant described Greta Van Fleet as “Led Zeppelin 1”. When asked about Kiszka’s voice he slyly said, “he borrowed it from someone I know well.” Of course, such interests “made it harder to talk to kids my age in school”, Kiszka said. “They didn’t know what any of this stuff was. It was an early realization that my family was uncommon.”