The Twilight Sad- It's the Long Goodbye (Album Review)

Scotland has always had some incredible rock music to offer over the decades, and The Twilight Sad emerged as one of the bigger names in the mid-2000s and 2010’s.  With a sound that was oriented towards layers of distortion and synths, melancholic riffs and accent heavy singing, the group found a space between indie rock, shoegaze, and post punk that helped them grab people’s attention.  While their material came out at a regular pace in the earlier years, following 2012’s No One Can Ever Know the gap between albums became longer.  Since 2019’s It Won/t Be Like This All the Time a lot has happened in the band’s world, as not only did the lineup shift in the post COVID era but frontman James Graham has navigated a significant amount of personal challenges and loss.  It’s this sense of grief and raw emotion that is at the core of the group’s fifth album It’s the Long Goodbye, but it also makes it their most impactful to date.

Musically It’s the Long Goodbye captures all the styles that have defined The Twilight Sad’s career, but everything feels like it has been fine tuned to draw you into the layers of melancholy.  The heavy emphasis on distortion and shoegaze adjacent elements still play a big role, but the electronic elements have also been reinforced in ways that give each of the songs a different identity.  Whether it’s the shift between softer acoustic guitar and booming layers of distortion on “Attempt a Crash Landing- Theme” or the bouncier electronic-laden “Waiting for the Phone Call”, the band shakes things up regularly while reinforcing the haunting and melancholic atmosphere.  The Twilight Sad has always generated comparisons to The Cure, and with Robert Smith contributing guitar, keys, and six-string bass on some of the material there remains plenty of overlap but the strength of the songwriting sets things apart.  “Dead Flowers” is the song that most reminds me of The Cure outright, as it has an extended instrumental intro that’s very dark and moody that leads into a more methodical and introspective cadence.  Other moments give off hints of The Jesus and Mary Chain, but it never comes off like the band is merely repeating what has come before.  It doesn’t feel like there’s a single wasted moment, as even at forty-eight minutes the instrumentation keeps you under its spell the entire time and each song feels deliberately constructed to have maximum impact with no filler.  “TV People Throwing TVs at People” may be one of the saddest tracks The Twilight Sad has ever written, and that’s saying a lot given their history.  The way this song builds from sparser keyboards and electronic buzzing to an immense layer of distortion with frantic drums is incredible, and when you layer in Graham’s raw singing it leaves a lasting impression.

Lyrics aren’t usually an area I focus too heavily on in my reviews given the subjective nature of how each person interprets them, but given the album explores prolonged grief and stress from the decline and eventual loss of his mother from dementia it deserves mention.  This is a sad and tear-jerking album from a band that already had its fair share of that in the past, and you can hear the outpouring of emotion in every verse.  The moves from softer, subdued singing to soaring pitches are stunning on songs like “Dead Flowers”, and the aforementioned “TV People Throwing TVs at People” has a cadence that feels like an accurate reflection of the emotional ups and downs of processing grief.  Graham’s heavier accent continues to give The Twilight Sad a different tone from other shoegaze and post punk bands of this type, and the performance here really put this material into truly breathtaking territory. 

It's clear when listening to It’s the Long Goodbye that Graham and company have been through so much in the years since their last album, but the resulting effort is some of the best music they’ve ever done.  The core components aren’t drastically different from the rest of their discography, but the instrumental arrangements and rawness of the vocal performance are so impactful that this album isn’t likely to leave people’s listening rotation for some time.  Whether you’ve followed The Twilight Sad since their earliest material or are brand new, this is an album worth diving into.  It’s the Long Goodbye is available from Rock Action Records.  

-Review by Chris Dahlberg