The Great Dying - A Constant Goodbye (2024) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Blood Explicit
02. New Meithico
03. Ride
04. Arterial Rain
05. Easy Way Out
06. Hurt Me
07. Truck Stop
08. Hard Few Days
09. The Sky Over Tennessee
10. New Years Day Blues

The music of Will Griffith’s The Great Dying is a mix he likes to call dark country. He grew up in Cleveland, Mississippi, where D.I.Y. punk house shows hooked him, and his early bands played The Farmhouse and legendary delta juke joint Po’ Monkey’s.

Songs from The Great Dying’s new album, A Constant Goodbye, were born from playing hundreds of shows supporting Bloody Noses & Roses (Dial Back Sound 2018), and it continues where the debut left off. The ballads are still sweet and menaced, the rockers are still hair-raisers, but the new record pushes in new directions, infusing sounds of classic country with faint traces of The Replacements and what was once called “alternative rock.” The tracks are layered and varied: wall-of-sound arrangements grind against flange-bass and fiddle, with Griffith’s barebones acoustic guitar and vocals at the root, and heartbreak all over.

Griffith sings songs with lyrics drawn from relationships gone both good and bad and hard-won struggles for sobriety and connection. “New Methico” portrays a young couple, running to California with only their dreams and drug problems, who make it to New Mexico before finding themselves drifted apart yet stuck together in dependency. It ends with the harrowing refrain, “Find a way out.”

“The Sky Over Tennessee” is a true story of meeting your high-school sweetheart, who’s become a pilot, at LaGuardia on your thirtieth birthday. This fleeting moment set between Nashville and New York opens into a meditation on the transience of love. The flip side of this romance is “New Year’s Day Blues,” a song grasping at the particular loneliness and isolation that follows a move to another town after a breakup, when it’s just you and an empty house.

“Arterial Rain” is a drunken honkey-tonk number that centers Griffith’s warm-and-tender yet rough-hewn vocals. He claims it’s based on Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings” but the title is a subtle nod to Slayer. Coming from another artist, this blend of influences would tank, but somehow it suits The Great Dying just fine. Pick any number on the new album—it’s a winner.

Dial Back Sound will release A Constant Goodbye on August 30th along with a video for the first single, “Truck Stop.” Dates from Mississippi up the East Coast will follow, with a wider North American tour in late summer and early fall.

DOWNLOAD ALBUM [flac]

DOWNLOAD ALBUM [Hi-Res]