Greenleaf - La tête et l'habitude [Red]

The Head & the Habit is Greenleaf's ninth album, and their sharpest, with its red vinyl and twenty-five years of Swedish fuzz behind it.

Greenleaf started in 2000 as a side project, something that already busy friends in Dozer, Lowrider and Demon Cleaner were doing purely for the fun of playing 1970s hard rock with no expectations. Nobody expected nine albums. Tommi Holappa's guitar has been the constant through it all, and he remains one of the true architects of European stoner rock, but the band only really stabilized when Arvid Hällagard joined as permanent vocalist for the album Trails & Passes in 2014. Classically trained, soulful, entirely disinterested in the genre's usual growl, he changed what Greenleaf could be.

What elevates this 2024 record above the rest is what Hällagard writes about. He works with people struggling with addiction and mental illness, and these songs read like symbolic short stories rather than the usual clichés of desert and perdition. A Wolf in My Mind is as unsettling as its title, Avalanche builds a monstrous riff into something closer to panic, and The Tricking Tree stretches over eight minutes without ever losing track. Breathe, Breathe Out opens the album with a fuzz thick enough to lean into.

Nine albums later, and they still sound like a band that plays for fun.