The Twilight Sad
It’s the Long Goodbye
ROCK ACTION

And as one thing ends, so another begins. That’s the crux of the new full-length album by Scotland’s premier proponents of existential angst, The Twilight Sad. The band’s sixth album It’s the Long Goodbye is centered around the intertwining duality of death and life that every human confronts in their time on Earth. Specifically, for singer James Graham—whose heavy Scottish brogue drips with stirring emotion more than usual on this record—these 10 tracks are inspired by polar-opposite experiences. Looming heavily in the dark shadows of these songs is the death of his mother, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2016, and who passed away in 2023. But in direct contrast, in that same period, Graham also got married and had children. As one thing ends, so another begins—and in the middle of it all, inspired by it all, is Graham’s own state of mental health.

This being The Twilight Sad, of course, these songs lean toward the darkness of the former more than they bask in the light of the latter. Indeed, opener “Get Away From It All” depicts the unshakeable effects of the cruelty of his mother’s illness, and the anguish that it wreaks on those close to the person suffering. “Why you leaving me? Why you slowly leaving me?” he pleads during the song’s cathartic rush of a chorus, atmospheric guitars and drums crashing down violently yet beautifully, like the most devastating but mesmerizing storm.

And that’s consistent throughout the rest of the album: The desolation, the despair, the desperation, the disbelief at his mother’s essence fading away, her life ending before it ends, is palpable. You don’t just hear it, you experience it. You become, on these songs, Graham himself as he inhabits all the stages of grief. They’re not necessarily in order, but they’re all there. “Why does it feel like nothing is real?” he asks on the moody, monochromatic chug of “The Ceiling Underground,” and as he does so you also feel him fall apart, numb, unbelieving, powerless. Yet through the music—made with longtime bandmate Andy MacFarlane—there’s grit and defiance, too. They don’t fully give into the despondency, but confront it, challenge its authority. The grief is imbued with the hope that becoming a father has given him, and the two exist, however uncomfortably, side by side.

The Cure’s Robert Smith, who has long claimed The Twilight Sad as his favorite band and has taken them on tour numerous times, makes his mark here, too. He plays on three of these songs, and though he doesn’t sing, that typically Cure-esque paradox of upbeat sadness weaves its way in. In some ways, It’s the Long Goodbye could be seen as a younger brother’s response to the same tragedy that Smith was mourning on 2024’s stunning Songs of a Lost World. They offer up similarly harrowing, poignant, and moving responses to that ineluctable circle of life that gives as it takes away.

FLOOD

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FLOOD Staff

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DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX