The Twilight Sad

The Twilight Sad are a Scottish post-punk/indie rock band, comprising James Graham (vocals), Andy MacFarlane (guitar), Johnny Docherty (bass), Brendan Smith (keyboards) and Grant Hutchison (drums). They have released five studio albums, as well as several EPs, live recordings and singles. Their 2007 debut album, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, drew widespread acclaim from critics, who noted Graham's thick Scottish accent and MacFarlane's dense sonic walls of shoegazing guitar and wheezing accordion. The Twilight Sad's notoriously loud live performances have been described as "completely ear-splitting", and the band toured for the album across Europe and the United States throughout 2007 and 2008. Sessions inspired by stripped-down and reworked live performances yielded the 2008 mini-album, Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did. The band's second album, Forget the Night Ahead, marked a shift in their direction; lyrically more personal and musically darker and more streamlined, it was released in 2009 to acclaim. Recording sessions for the album also produced the mid-2010 release The Wrong Car, which followed the departure of founding bassist Craig Orzel in February 2010. The Twilight Sad's third album, No One Can Ever Know, was released in February 2012 and marked another stylistic shift, with the band citing industrial music and krautrock influences for a darker, sparser sound. The band's fourth album, entitled Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave, was released in late October 2014 to universally positive reviews, and was the band's last album with founding member Mark Devine, who left amicably in January 2018. The Twilight Sad's fifth studio album, It Won/t Be Like This All the Time, was released in January 2019 to further critical acclaim. The band has described their sound as "folk with layers of noise", and music critics have described the band as "perennially unhappy" and "a band that inject some real emotion and dynamic excitement into a comparatively standard template."