When the Curtain Falls

Greta Van Fleet's "When the Curtain Falls" is unapologetic 1970s hard rock reanimated by musicians who were barely out of high school, and its sheer conviction is what makes it work despite the obvious debt. It opens with a strutting, blues-fried riff — thick, mid-heavy Les Paul tone, drums recorded roomy and analog-warm with real cymbal decay — and never lets up on the swagger. Josh Kiszka's voice is the divisive centerpiece: a piercing, banshee-high wail with a hard vibrato and a throat-shredding attack that lands somewhere between Robert Plant and a siren, riding well above the band's register. Lyrically it's a portrait of a performer whose beauty and fame are burning down in real time, a fading actress facing the moment the applause stops — a young band writing about the vanity of stardom before they've had much of it. The Frankenmuth, Michigan brothers arrived in 2018 into a rock landscape that had gone soft and streaming-friendly, and their retro maximalism was either salvation or pastiche depending on who you asked; the argument itself made them famous. Play it loud in a car with the windows down, in a bar with sticky floors, or anywhere that rewards volume over subtlety — this is music built for physical rooms, not headphones.