The Twilight Sad have never made a record quite like It's the Long Goodbye, and they've spent two decades making records about despair. Something has changed. The Glasgow duo's seventh album — seven years in the making, now down to just James Graham and Andy MacFarlane — is a record where stylized sadness has been replaced by the real thing, where the aesthetic of grief has given way to actual grief, and the result is one of the most bracingly cathartic albums you'll hear this year.
The backstory matters. In the years between It Won't Be Like This All the Time and this album, Graham became a father. His mother was diagnosed with dementia. The touring took its toll. The band cancelled a Cure support tour in 2023 as the illness deepened. His mother died in 2025. What remained was the material Graham and MacFarlane had spent years accumulating, which they compressed into this album like a pressure system.
Robert Smith appears on three songs and advised on arrangements throughout. The Twilight Sad and the Cure have been in mutual admiration for years — Smith first asked them to open for his band a decade ago — and his fingerprints feel exactly right here. On 'Waiting for the Phone Call,' his layered guitars heighten a sense of hyperactive dread. On 'Dead Flowers,' a seven-minute song that slowly expands to fill all available space, his presence is felt in the keyboards that encase Graham's voice like fog.
MacFarlane's arrangements are the album's architecture: he builds soundscapes that are simultaneously oppressive and tender, walls of sound that protect Graham rather than drown him. Graham's writing has never been this direct. 'Chest Wound to the Chest' is exactly the kind of title that would feel try-hard on another record; here it's devastating matter-of-fact. The repetition throughout — recurring phrases about loss and leaving — creates the sensation of circling without being able to land, which is exactly what mourning feels like.
This is a record that requires something from the listener. It's long, deliberate, and emotionally demanding. But demanding isn't the same as difficult, and It's the Long Goodbye justifies every minute of its runtime. This is what it sounds like when a band stops performing grief and starts processing it. Grade: A.