Brian McCollum | Detroit Free Press

Once in a while, if you’re lucky, the zeitgeist throws a fun curveball.

On the face of things, perhaps there’s no obvious reason Greta Van Fleet and its hippie hard rock should have the prominence it does right now — not in this musical era dominated by hip-hop, pop and social-media celebrity drama.

But here we are, and the Frankenmuth-bred, Detroit-based rock band just delivered an old-school album with a big gust of hype at its back. “Anthem of the Peaceful Army,” the quartet’s full-length debut, was released Friday, the latest career milestone for a young band whose year has included transatlantic touring, big festival gigs, magazine covers, network TV and praise from the likes of Elton John and Robert Plant.

Last month, GVF sold out three upcoming Fox Theatre shows in minutes — 15,000 ticket-buyers who could have filled Little Caesars Arena. It’s the biggest rock phenomenon to emerge out of Michigan since the White Stripes broke big at the turn of the millennium.

It couldn’t happen to a more affable group of guys. The GVF energy offstage is as upbeat and infectious as it is on, and you can credit the family ties: Twins Josh Kiszka (vocals) and Jake Kiszka (guitar) are 22, their brother Sam Kiszka (bass) is three years younger, and 19-year-old Danny Wagner (drums) is a friend since childhood in tiny Frankenmuth.

In person, they’re a tight-knit, animated and chatty bunch, quick to finish one another's sentences. Spending time with the band, as the Free Press did this year in the studio and elsewhere, is to witness a relentless stream of giggly inside jokes amid the passionate, earnest tone that takes over when talk turns to music.

Greta Van Fleet is a modern, millennial take on classic rock’s golden age, unapologetically nodding to blues-rock oldies like Cream, Vanilla Fudge and the titan to which the band is relentlessly compared, Led Zeppelin. In the hands of GVF, the stuff is as much mystical as muscular, typified by the two songs that bookend the new album, the patchouli-scented “Age of Man” and “Anthem.”

Whatever sense of danger is lacking in Greta Van Fleet — that simmering darkness so embedded in the group’s influences — it’s compensated by a wide-eyed purity of purpose.

“Beauty lives in every soul,” Josh sings on the opening track. “The more you love, the more you know.”

Having made its name in 2017 with a pair of beefy, searing rock-radio hits, “Highway Tune” and “Safari Song,” GVF set out to shake things up as it hit the studio for the next big step. With the Universal Music-affiliated Lava Records now on board, the band expanded the palette: The themes went universal — human unity in a time of division — and the sounds went broad, integrating the folk and prog-rock sounds the band was now absorbing.

“This is sincere and hopefully not any bit pretentious,” said Josh, who conceived the album’s theme while drifting in and out of sleep on a tour bus. “But it’s like Francis Ford Coppola making ‘Apocalypse Now’ or something — if you don’t do it right, you’re really (screwed). Because you can come off as just pretentious if you’re aiming high and you don’t make it. This is sincere. It’s about the human story.”

Said Sam: “We figured out what the album meant to us about 80% of the way through recording: to be taken seriously, to have a body of work that can stand.”

If Led Zep must be the frame of reference, then Greta Van Fleet’s debut album is really its “Led Zeppelin III”: less of the full-throttle crunch, more of the eclectic musical adventurism. The record is laced with folk touches, left-field excursions and idealistic calls to a bell-bottomed flower-power age that was fading by 1970 — let alone 2018.

“On this record, we really tried to make landscapes with sounds,” said Sam. “You listen to (the Beatles’) White Album, and with every song, you have this picture in your head of what the story is, or how it is. That’s what we tried to capture.”

All four GVF members can be described as free spirits, but that’s most embodied in singer Josh, the late sleeper who’d occasionally roll into the studio at nightfall after a day of nuts-and-bolts work by the rest of the band. It was easy to notice the lilting British accent that crept into his stage patter in 2018. The whole band had been doing it behind the scenes — a running gag prompted by an episode of “Californication” — but it was Josh who merrily adopted the voice for his public persona.

During a Free Press photo shoot in May, band members spotted a nearby row of bushes and instantly dived in — an impromptu bustle-in-the-hedgerow that captured Greta's freewheeling mindset.

"There’s something about that inner child, a spiritual element to be connected to the inside," Josh said. "You allow yourself to let loose and be liberated — that’s the whole (rock 'n' roll) genre. ... It’s just letting yourself have fun and laugh. And that’s where the best stuff comes from."

Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press

Hitting the studio

Lava introduced the new music in July with the album’s most straightforward rock track, “When the Curtain Falls,” a take on Hollywood shallowness that brings “playful, glimmering light to something that can be really dark,” as Josh put it.

That rollicking tune sits on a 10-track album laced with thick Southern rock (“The Cold Wind”), black-lights-and-weed head music (“Brave New World”), acoustic anthems ("You're the One") and pedal-to-the-metal heat ("Lover Leaver [Taker Believer]").

“Anthem of the Peaceful Army” was produced by a trio of veteran Detroit music guys who are now calling themselves the Rust Brothers. They come with Kid Rock connections: Rustbelt Studios owner Al Sutton was Rock’s longtime engineer; Marlon Young is Twisted Brown Trucker’s lead guitarist; vocal coach Herschel Boone is a backing singer.

Sutton and Young were the studio team behind Greta’s pair of EPs in 2017, two years after the teenage musicians showed up at the Rustbelt doorstep eager to learn. They’d been pointed there by Vinnie Dombroski, the Sponge singer who was among the earliest backers of the little-known group. The first song laid to tape: “Highway Tune.”

“There was no goal at that point. Thinking back on it now, I think we were just looking for the experience,” said Jake. “We wanted to track some of our stuff, but we weren’t looking to put out an album or anything.”

The band’s musical growth spurt happened mostly in the studio. Only last year, when GVF’s recorded material took off following the Lava deal, did the group start touring in earnest. While “Highway Tune” and “Safari Song” were racking up big streaming numbers and radio play, Greta Van Fleet was getting a breakneck lesson about life as a road band.

Buzz on Greta Van Fleet was so hot by the time 2018 arrived, Sutton and Young were fielding continual calls from other band agents and label executives: “We need to get the guys who did Greta Van Fleet.”

Pre-production on the Greta album started in January at Rustbelt, down the street from the rented Royal Oak house the band temporarily called home. With months of touring looming, this was nose-to-the-grindstone time, as the band sifted through existing musical ideas and cranked out new ones to start shaping the album.

“This is the only game plan right now: Write, drink, make music,” Young said at the time.

For Sutton and Young, the job was mostly about steering the ship for four guys who — left to their own devices — might have been just as happy to sit around jamming and brainstorming. The creative juices were flowing hard. Riffs and ideas were sprouting up constantly, discussed using a number system devised by Sam to signify musical intensity — as in, “We could probably take this one up to a 7.”

“We couldn’t ever focus on just the song we were recording at the time,” said Jake. “It would always slip into something else.”

On the Rustbelt fridge was a homemade mock-up of a ‘70s newspaper article, meant to drill discipline through satire: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were forced to bail on Zeppelin’s latest recording session, read the fake headline, because that damned car from Frankenmuth had “broken down” once again. The message: Hard work, no excuses.

HERFitz PR

By February, action moved to Nashville’s Blackbird Studio “to get them away from their element here,” as Young said. At Blackbird, in the thick of Music City, the Greta guys were kids in a toy store, gleefully experimenting with the vast assortment of microphones, amps and instruments on hand. The bulk of the album was cut there, with Rustbelt reserved for overdubs of guitar, vocals and percussion.

“We made an album for ourselves,” said Josh. “A little self-indulgent? Sure. But if I made a movie or wrote a book, I would be doing that for myself too. And that’s probably the best way to go about it. Because if you’re making it for somebody else, then it’s not really going to sound like you. You’ll lose yourself. You’ll get out of your own vision.”

Kinfolk rock

"Anthem of the Peaceful Army" came together over five months, amid increasing distractions. By March the band was facing its tour commitments and began to squeeze in studio time amid trips across North America and Europe.

Ultimately, "all those distractions helped," said Jake. "The album captured the chaos."

The trial-by-fire also strengthened the band's internal union — three brothers and a buddy taking on the world.

The guys in GVF, attuned to rock history, had already made a vow early in their career: No creative conflicts, no music-biz strife, would ever trump the personal bond. This would always be family and friends first. No Kinks or Oasis here.

"There have been so many tragic brothers in bands that will just completely destroy each other. That just won’t ever happen to us," said Josh. "We’re just not wired like that. It gives us some sort of advantage. It feels like you’re always at home, and home is where love is. We can communicate."

As twins, Josh and Jake said they've even experienced a kind of musical telepathy. Jake recounted a moment at one of Greta's early shows, during the chorus of "Safari Song," when he decided on the fly to join in with Josh at the microphone.

"I looked over at Josh. He didn’t see me, but I had this feeling I needed to go up there," he recalled. "After the show, he said, ‘How did you know I wanted you to come up in that exact moment?’ ”

Christopher M. Bjornberg, Special to the Free Press

Lessons in notoriety

For all the positive vibes surrounding Greta Van Fleet, there’s no getting around it: The band has become a polarizing presence for some critics and listeners.

Amid the warm welcome from grateful fans of old-school rock, detractors have pounced. Why all the hype? Wasn’t Jet trying this in the early 2000s? Didn’t Tame Impala dabble in the early 2010s? At best, the accusation goes, GVF is wearing an interesting musical suit but just hasn't grown into it yet.

The argument may sound familiar. If you were around in the '80s, you encountered countless bands glomming on to the Zeppelin sound and aesthetic — from Kingdom Come and Great White on up.

But those were Led Zep zealots stuck in an MTV era. However sincere the intentions, they were slathered in the trappings of their times: The hair was blown out, the attitude felt hand-me-down, the musical gestures seemed studied.

The young kids in Greta Van Fleet are in a different place, benefiting from the distance — and innocence — afforded by time. They've occasionally bristled at the Zeppelin comparisons without entirely fending them off, but insist their sound emerged naturally.

There's a defiance in play now too.

“We’ve been lucky enough to have been considered (revivalists) of this rock ‘n’ roll scene that people will claim has been dormant for so long,” said Josh. “And in that sense, we kind of get to reinvent all kinds of things.”

In the age of social media and YouTube comment sections, the guys in GVF got a crash course in life as public figures — a "totally weird" transition this past year, Sam said.

In the end, the positive response has outweighed any negative scrutiny. And there's a stability that comes thanks to the band's small-town roots.

"There are people that really respect what you're doing," said Jake. "They can see that you're changing certain aspects of society, the way music can be done. So when I'm in the grocery store and somebody stops me to say, 'I really love your music and appreciate what you're doing,' that feels really good."

"We come from a very humbling, supportive community," said Danny. "So I honestly couldn't be happier. Where I'm at right now — with my family, with these guys — there's nothing to bring me down."

Contact Detroit Free Press music writer Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.

Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press

Greta Van Fleet

7 p.m. Dec. 27, 29, 30