INTERVIEW WITH BRENT MILLS BY SAMMIE STAR
The most beautiful art is always vulnerable. If there is any band that knows anything about this very concept, it is Louisville’s genre-defying quartet, Greyhaven. Coming into their fourth studio release, Keep It Quiet, opens the door to another level of emotional exploration for the band. Produced by Will Putney (Knocked Loose, Bad Omens), Keep It Quiet is a raw, turbulent, and impassioned new chapter for the band’s sound, one that trades metaphor for emotional nakedness and turns silence into screams. For frontman Brent Mills, metaphor has always been somewhat of a crutch, a reactive instinct to hide rather than confront. For Keep It Quiet, Miller is an open book, and the tension between being open and the desire to obscure is what drives this latest release.
“For me and for all of us, we’ve been writing this record for what feels like forever. We were starting the initial writing for the record around the time that we did the EP, because our first thought was our first release with Solid State Records was going to be a full length, but with touring, time constraints, and just kind of how long it took to finally nail down where we were going to record it, we opted on doing the EP, so we selected a couple songs that made sense to do that. However, we have a large collection of songs that we were finalizing for the record. But for us, I think we just kind of naturally want to push the sound of the band further and further with every record, you know,” responds vocalist Brent Mills. “I think for us individually as well, that means, how can we bring something new to the table? How can we improve upon the last release? We like to challenge ourselves a lot when it comes to writing the songs, so it was kind of natural. But also, I think somehow with this, I think just maturing…maybe is the right word. The songs kind of made more sense. They flowed a little bit more. There are bigger choruses and just more picky parts. And I’m not sure if we did that intentionally; it’s just how they manifested themselves. However, with this one, we also wanted to experiment a little bit more. We wanted to incorporate more sounds than were not on previous records, and not be afraid to explore what that looks like for us. And I think it comes through in the record. We wanted to lean into some of the more interesting things that we had never recorded, things we had never done before.”
While this record was all about being open and trying new things, Keep It Quiet holds a deeper meaning at the helm of its overt openness: while there is value in restraint, there is also a cost for silence. The title itself rings a bit ironic on the tongue, as there is nothing quiet about Greyhaven’s new release. Keep It Quiet is a quiet volcano, waiting for the right time to confessionally erupt under the pressure of unspoken truths. While it’s often been the style of Greyhaven to blur the lines within genres and their lyrics, Keep It Quiet uses the power of their hardcore roots to musically and lyrically push themselves into a new territory. A rollercoaster of inner turmoil, bloodcurdling screams, antagonistic breakdowns, and infectious choruses that cling to your soul, Keep It Quiet represents a microcosm of the band’s sonic ethos: disjointed, magnetic, and emotionally torrid. Similar to Miller’s emotional vertigo that went on behind the scenes to finish the record, sometimes one has to be physically pushed out of their comfort zone to feel what it’s like not to be chained by fear or insecurity. For Mills, Keep It Quiet was not just about exploring another ambitious side to their sound, but also about building inner confidence to talk about things that one would rather leave buried. The result was not just a sonic breath of fresh air, but one that trembles, bleeds, and burns to reach a point of existential freedom.
“We finished the music all together in January, and then we had went to the UK in the middle of recording with our producer Will Putney, which was kind of a really crazy experiment and experience in itself, but I think going over there traveling and it being winter, when I got back, I was supposed to start vocals, but I got sick, so I wasn’t able to track. So, the record was finished instrumentally, and then I went home and had a whole month of February to finish writing all the vocal parts,” Mills recalls. “I was having kind of a hard time with it. Honestly, I felt like I had a lot of momentum, and then I got sick, which kind of killed it. It was like pulling teeth for me at home to get to the finish line, but slowly, full songs started to flesh themselves out. I realized the only way to get this done was to be very open and vulnerable, and not be so judgmental about what I was writing down. There were a lot of things that were coming up that were really personal for me that I hadn’t even really unpacked and dealt with in my real life, so I wasn’t sure, confident, or ready even to unpack them in a record, but that’s what was getting written down. So I just leaned into that and just kind of let it happen that way. I remember talking to Tom in the middle of it, too, and I was like, I kind of said exactly that to him, and he said, lean into it. Be vulnerable, because that’s what’s going to make a better record. That’s what people will connect with. So I did, and it’s weird for me. For most of the lyrics, I usually try to hide things in abstractness. I understand what they mean, and in previous records, it wasn’t so obvious. With this, there’s a lot of content that is very literal, which people might not understand if they’re not aware of the stories and context. But like, it was kind of freeing to kind of just say all this stuff. It might not be so obvious to a listener, but for me, it’s like, it’s pretty hard to put that down on paper, so I think that’s kind of why it feels so emotional and vulnerable, because there’s a lot of stuff there for me. But it wasn’t really a decision. It was almost out of necessity. It was as if there was a sense that this needed to be done. We’re getting to the finish line. I have to fly out in a week, and half of the record wasn’t done, so I have to figure it out. And that’s how it happened. And I’m really grateful for it. Honestly, it’s a huge sense of relief to look at it and feel really proud of it.”
