There is a version of this album that could have been a well-crafted exercise in documented grief. A singer loses his mother to dementia, pours it into songs, and the result is moving in the expected way. The Twilight Sad’s It’s the Long Goodbye is not that. It is something rawer, less managed, and considerably harder to shake.

In the seven years since It Won’t Be Like This All the Time, James Graham watched his mother’s mind dissolve while he was simultaneously becoming a father. He cancelled a planned tour with the Cure. He went quiet. When his mother died in 2025, he and Andy MacFarlane, now the only other permanent member of the band, finally had enough distance, or enough energy, or both, to assemble what they had.

What they assembled with Robert Smith’s help turns out to be the best thing they have made.

Smith’s presence here is worth addressing directly because it is easy to reduce it to a guest spot or a prestige move. It is neither. He appears on three songs and advised on arrangements throughout, and his fingerprints are in the fabric of the record without ever being its story. On “Waiting for the Phone Call,” his layered guitars push the track’s anxiety to the edge of something unmanageable. On “Dead Flowers,” which runs over seven minutes, his keyboard washes give the song the kind of slow-spreading dread that the Cure has been perfecting since 1982. But Smith is here as a collaborator, not a headliner. He knows that.

Graham’s writing throughout It’s the Long Goodbye is stripped of the ornamentation that sometimes softened his earlier work. The imagery is direct. The pain is not stylized. He returns to certain phrases across the album, creating an undercurrent of repetition that does not feel like stasis so much as the feeling of being stuck, of circling back to the same terrible realization. Loss does not move in one direction. Neither does this record.

MacFarlane’s arrangements find a way to hold both the band’s guitar-forward past and the synthesizer palette of their recent work without the seams showing. When the album gets loud, as it does on “TV People Still Throwing TVs at People,” there is empathy in the volume. The guitars do not crash down on Graham so much as they gather around him. The sonic effect is almost protective.

“Dead Flowers” is the album’s centerpiece and its most formally ambitious piece. Seven minutes is a commitment, and the song earns every second of it. It begins in restraint and ends somewhere that feels like standing in a field after everything has already happened. The Cure comparison is unavoidable, but it is not an imitation. It is two bands that share a sensibility arriving at the same emotional coordinates from different angles.

The album’s closing stretch moves toward something that might be described as release, though the word feels too clean. What Graham achieves by the end of It’s the Long Goodbye is not resolution. It is more like the feeling of having said the thing you needed to say out loud, finally, after years of not being able to form the words. The relief in that is real, and so is the exhaustion.

This is a grief record that does not traffic in grief’s familiar aesthetics. There are no soft piano interludes, no tasteful distances. It is loud where it needs to be, and when it goes quiet, the quiet is not peaceful. It took seven years and a lifetime’s worth of material to get here. The result is worth every minute of the wait.