The Twilight Sad build a rhythm and add layers of growing intensity, veering between gothic-tinged indie rock and enormous post-rock explosions, and do it all in service of conveying human grief with a crushing and devastating reality that very few bands in the world can match. Their sixth album It’s The Long Goodbye is absolutely magnificent.

The sonic world of It’s The Long Goodbye sits at a very specific intersection with the grandeur of Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky and Godspeed You! Black Emperor but contained within an indie rock song structure with verses and choruses and a grounded reality that keeps everything tethered to the human rather than the cosmic. The lineage of Joy Division and The Cure with the combination of danceable rhythms and gloomy subject matter is combined with the wind coming off the Scottish highlands sounding ancient and unsparing.

The Twilight Sad have always dealt in grief better than almost any band alive, and James Graham wrote this album about saying goodbye to his mother resulting in their most personal and powerful work so far. The atmosphere is gothic and melodramatic but the emotion is devastatingly real. It’s difficult to think of other bands who have integrated the piano as powerfully as The Twilight Sad do here as a force capable of both intimate focus and soaring peaks that double up with massive guitar lines in moments that are truly epic.

Get Away From It All opens the album across five minutes that move from intimate piano to huge screaming guitar lines with overwhelming grief set to music that keeps expanding to fill every available space. Designed To Lose is fast, groovy and gut-wrenching with hard and intense drumming, and Waiting For The Phone Call brings electronic elements at pace with Robert Smith guesting on guitar. A close friend lending his voice, he also appears on Dead Flowers and Back To Fourteen. Even the song titles Inhospitable/Hospital and Chest Wound To The Chest are blunt and evocative, speaking to a lyricist with no interest in prettifying what he’s going through,

The band is obsessed with scale and space, and many of these songs roll past the five minute mark giving grief the room it actually takes up. TV People Still Throwing TVs At People closes everything out fast, enormous and completely unresolved, which is of course exactly how grief works, and it’s Graham’s voice that prevents all of this from tipping into melodrama. A remarkable instrument, his thick Glaswegian accent is raw and absolutely full of anguish, yet reserved compared to everything happening around it with the band playing much louder than he sings.

The music on It’s The Long Goodbye matches the enormity of the feeling, as a lone voice stands inside the storm trying to articulate something that keeps exceeding language. An enormous tapestry of grief, creating a powerful album out of the most painful experience.