shoegaze

I listened to this while making dinner most evenings for a fortnight before it properly took hold. Immediate enough to keep me coming back from the first spin, experimental enough that the hooks kept rearranging themselves each time.

feeble little horse are a trio now, founding guitarist Ryan Walchonski having left in early 2025, and bitknot is louder and stranger for it. Plain, detached, conversational vocals sit over electronic textures that keep getting shredded by bursts of distorted guitar. On “Dior” Lydia Slocum picks apart some indie frontperson by telling them who they aren’t: “You are not David Berman / You are not Kurt Cobain.” The person she’s actually addressing gets bleeped, redacted like a curse on the radio.

It saves its best for the end of its short running time. “Shopping” is petty envy, Slocum eyeing a prettier girl and plotting to swipe her phone and scroll her designer wishlist. Then “DMT” (death, money, tech, and the drug) build into much bigger, nastier territory: Slocum listing those harbingers like a mantra while the guitars fuzz over her. Noise and melody at once.

The Twilight Sad have spent twenty years working a seam between Scottish indie, goth, and shoegaze—three sounds that have drifted in and out of fashion around them. It’s The Long Goodbye is their first record in seven years, and it arrives at a moment when shoegaze has gone from a minor concern to something close to a default setting for young guitar bands. Good timing.

James Graham wrote the album while watching his mother live with early-onset dementia. I didn’t know that on first listen—I learned it later, and the lyrics rearranged themselves accordingly on the third or fourth pass. The title stops being a phrase and starts being a description.

Likely to find them their biggest audience yet, and deservedly so.