The Battle at Garden's Gate

The Battle at Garden's Gate is Greta Van Fleet's second album, released by Lava/Republic on 16 April 2021, two and a half years after Anthem of the Peaceful Army; the Japanese edition, UICY-15978, came out the same day. It was produced by Greg Kurstin, whose credits include Foo Fighters, Paul McCartney and Adele. Work began in the summer of 2019 in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, where the band recorded the love song "Light My Love" with Kurstin as a first test of how they worked together; by the band's own account, that one song convinced them to make the album with him. Sessions went on at Henson Recording Studios and No Expectations Studio, and "Caravel" and "The Barbarians" were the last songs added, during the pandemic. What the four had seen on the road runs through the record. They spoke of how meeting new people and cultures had changed their idea of what was normal, and by this time they had moved from Michigan to Nashville. Josh Kiszka described an album with Biblical references throughout, set in a world of ancient civilisations like a parallel universe, and made on the scale of a film score. The closing "The Weight of Dreams" runs to nearly nine minutes; its outro grew out of a long-standing live piece the band had nicknamed the "Black Flag Exposition". "My Way, Soon" arrived in October 2020 with a video the band shot, edited and directed themselves, and became their fifth No. 1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart; "Age of Machine" followed in December with the album announcement, then "Heat Above" in February 2021 and "Broken Bells" in March. The album opened at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and at No. 1 on both Top Rock Albums and Hard Rock Albums, and reached No. 8 in the UK. Guitar World's readers voted the "Age of Machine" solo the best of 2021, and in 2023 named the solo that ends "The Weight of Dreams" the best guitar solo of the 21st century. The Japanese edition adds live versions of "Heat Above" and "Stardust Chords", for fourteen tracks in all.