The Twilight Sad’s name is well chosen: Over the past two decades, they’ve touched upon every shade of misery. They’ve let anxiety course through their veins, wrapped themselves in icy sheets of loneliness, made a home in exquisite rendered despair. Existential melancholy hardens into mourning on It’s the Long Goodbye, a record where stylized desolation gets leveled by life.
In the seven years separating It’s the Long Goodbye and its predecessor, It Won’t Be Like This All the Time, the Twilight Sad’s lead singer, James Graham, experienced a lifetime’s worth of change. Graham became a father around the same time his mother was diagnosed with dementia. The toll of her deepening dementia took its toll on his own mental health, leading the band to cancel a planned tour with the Cure in 2023. After she died, in 2025, Graham regained the energy to sculpt the material that he and Andy MacFarlane, now the only other member of the group, had amassed in their years of trudging through the murk. Together, they’ve compressed the cycle of bereavement into an album that feels bracingly cathartic.
The duo had some aid from the Cure’s Robert Smith, who first asked the Twilight Sad to open for his band a decade ago; their mutual admiration society evolved into friendship and creative partnership. Smith appears on three songs here, and he also advised on arrangements and structure. His fingerprints can be detected on “Waiting for the Phone Call,” where he adds layers of guitars that heighten the song’s sense of hyperactive dread. He’s also evident in the washes of keyboard that encase “Dead Flowers,” a song that spills over the course of seven minutes, its length hinting at the Cure’s glacial majesty. But Smith’s presence is never overwhelming. Like Arab Strap drummer David Jeans and Mogwai touring bassist Alex Mackay, he’s here in support, fleshing out MacFarlane’s soundscapes, which in turn cradle and contradict Graham’s emotional downpour.
Grief has brought Graham’s guard down. His writing throughout It’s the Long Goodbye is direct and affectless, leaving little doubt of the pain he’s spent the past few years negotiating. The record teems with imagery of loss and leaving, the recurring phrases creating an undercurrent of desperation; he can’t escape because circumstances are beyond his control. The repetition doesn’t conjure stasis so much as the struggle to find a way forward. While Graham does achieve a sense of release with “TV People Still Throwing TVs at People,” much of the sense of progression on It’s the Long Goodbye derives from the music.
Returning to the guitars that characterized the band’s earliest work without renouncing their latter-day synths, MacFarlane gives Graham’s ruminations an urgent tenderness. Even when the Twilight Sad play loud, there’s empathy in the roar, as if they’re willing Graham to get lost within their swirl; he can shout whenever he’s ready to come out. The tactic means that the band often prioritizes crashing waves of sound—which can be bracing, as the opener “Get Away from It All” proves—but they also articulate specific details by sharpening their hooks on “Chest Wound to the Chest” and building the tension on "Back to Fourteen."
“Back to Fourteen” seems to rhyme with “That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy,” their debut single, from nearly 20 years ago. There, Graham conveyed the consuming angst of adolescence, taking a sarcastic swipe at a “loving mother.” Here, he pleads, “Don’t take her away from me”—when he’s not asking, “Mother, may I lay down and die?” The blackness settles in as he struggles to accept her death; he briefly reimagines his teens as a deliverance, not a cage. It’s a coping mechanism, one way to process a profound loss. What’s remarkable about It’s the Long Goodbye is that even in these moments of consuming anguish, the album doesn’t feel oppressive. The musicians’ interplay and MacFarlane’s exquisitely sculpted production balance Graham’s grief with consolation. The music leads the singer out of the darkness.
