“You know I love to rock climb, I love the outdoors,” Leto said, his predilection for scaling craggy peaks well-documented by now. “I’m on stage with Thirty Seconds to Mars playing shows, so I’m pretty active.”
And just as his lifestyle brand Twentynine Palms bills itself as “sustenance for the body and psyche,” so it goes that his band’s first album in five years is intended as a balm for what’s been existentially ailing you.
While both sides of the coin are obviously represented in the title, It’s the End of the World But a Beautiful Day, Leto said he remains “quite optimistic” about humanity’s prospects despite all the global doom and gloom of the past several years.
“Get Up Kid” is “a song to our younger selves,” he explained. “It’s a song to encourage us to continue to persevere, to put one foot in front of the other and keep marching on. And it’s nice to have a song like that out in the world that could speak to people, maybe in some of their darker days, and remind us that, ‘You know what, things are going to be ok.'”