The Great Dying by Sad Dad Autumn: Album Review

by admin November 15, 2025

November 15, 2025

The Great Dying by Sad Dad Autumn: Album Review

Sad Dad Autumn’s debut album The Great Dying arrives on November 14, 2025, bringing the best of myth and memory. Emerging from their century-old Seattle home, the Holgate sisters, Leah, Lily, and Lilah, shape a cinematic indie-folk narrative about a girl descending through grief, drawing from Greek mythology, their own tragedies, and even the vast immensity of the Permian extinction. The project swoons your senses as you picture rain outside their living room studio and sense the creak of floorboards settling into the songs. Their collaborative process passes fragments between sisters until something clicks and gives the album an organic, dreamlike pulse, as if the record grew rather than was written.

“The Great Dying,” the opening track, sets the tone with its warm acoustic strums and a delicate, floating vocal that drifts like breath on cold air, like the first gentle, resigned, inevitable step into the underworld. The harmonies hover softly, giving the track a lantern-lit glow while the music swells behind her in muted warmth.

Then comes “Gut Punch,” which eases in with quiet strumming and an almost whispered vocal, only to crack open in the chorus: “Someone put me back to sleep before I get too vicious.” The sisters let tension bleed into the arrangement, as the bridge grows hazy, heavier, as her voice strains upward, “Take me back to what I was before”—followed by a faint, anxious electronic buzz, like a nerve misfiring. It’s a gorgeous unraveling.

By the time the album reaches “Alpha Cas,” things shift into a hypnotic post-rock trance. A catchier acoustic rhythm underpins sharper, speeding guitar lines that glint like starlight. The drums rumble slowly, and the whole song feels suspended between serenity and eruption. Glide Magazine wasn’t exaggerating when they called it moody and atmospheric, because there’s a searching spirit here, something bigger than the trio themselves, and they chase it fearlessly.

The Great Dying is a debut that whispers, aches, and burns—an album that turns grief into mythology and mythology into something so human, it connects us all with our genes tying us back together.