About The Twilight Sad
The Twilight Sad are a Scottish post-punk/indie rock band, comprising James Graham , Andy MacFarlane , Johnny Docherty , Brendan Smith and Grant Hutchison . 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."
The foundation for the group started in Kilsyth and the neighbouring village of Banton, when vocalist James Graham met guitarist Andy MacFarlane in high school and went on to form a cover band with some friends, which included drummer Mark Devine. After leaving school, they decided to take it more seriously. In late 2003, MacFarlane met bassist Craig Orzel in a bus stop and invited him to join the newly formed band. They took their name from a line in the poem "But I Was Looking at the Permanent Stars" by British poet Wilfred Owen, which reads "Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad."
They performed two highly experimental shows at The 13th Note Café in Glasgow that revolved around 30-minute noise jams with guitars, bass, drums, theremin, tape loops from films and old folk and country songs, effects pedals, toy keyboards, thumb pianos, and computer games. Afterwards, they decided to take a more traditional approach, which led them to write their first song, "That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy".
In September 2006, they produced a 4-song demo with a 24-track desk recorded at Paulshalls Studios in Cumbernauld recorded by David McKellar, trying to get the best representation as possible, and sent it over to Brighton-based Fat Cat Records. Alex Knight, co-founder of the label, went to Glasgow to watch the band perform their third gig and signed them on the spot. The demo recordings were later issued commercially on a split cassette tape release with Frightened Rabbit for Record Store Day in 2011.
Map & Directions To Venue
