My first introduction to Junior Boys was in autumn 2003. I had taken half a year off to travel alone, and I’d just left London, where a friend had given me a copy of the Birthday EP. I’d heard the single once or twice in passing before, but my first meaningful interaction with it wasn’t until later that week, on a nine-hour night train ride from Austria to Budapest. I listened to the whole EP on repeat that night, its brittle rhythms and gleaming synths coalescing with the dark shapes and city lights in constant renewal on the other side of my window, the unfamiliarity of my surroundings giving it all a further resonance.
There are special songs, and there are special memories, but if you’re one of those nostalgia-bitten people for whom neither seem quite vivid enough on their own, nothing matches what happens when the two dovetail. The beauty of these moments is they refuse to be architected—we can’t force them any more than we can explain them. And while the Junior Boys aren’t magicians, they speak the language of that magic as well as anyone making music today. (In the band’s official bio, K-Punk blog’s Mark Fisher writes that So This Is Goodbye is a “travel sick” record—I’d go him one further and say that specific sensation of travel sickness is at stake every time they set out to make music.)

Just their second full-length overall, So This Is Goodbye isn’t just an improbable notch above 2004’s Last Exit—it’s also among the best records you’ll hear all year. The first complete album made by vocalist Jeremy Greenspan without the aid of founding member and presumed rhythmic engine Johnny Dark, it finds the Boys (now rounded out by onetime engineer Matthew Didemus) working within comparatively streamlined song structures, the rhythmic capriciousness that so strongly informed their debut all but erased from the whiteboard. And yet, despite this radical formal departure, Goodbye draws out so many of the same sensations and colors that it feels like a natural next step. If anything, the absence of those slippery rhythm tracks puts the focus even more squarely on Greenspan, who delivers with a record full of elegant melodies.