Sad Dad Autumn deliver a haunting & heartfelt Triumph on "The Great Dying"
With The Great Dying, Seattle sister trio Sad Dad Autumn step out of their century-old home and into the indie-folk spotlight with one of the most striking debut albums of the year. The Holgate sisters, Leah (20), Lily (15), and Lilah (11), have created a cinematic, emotionally layered journey that feels far beyond their ages, weaving grief, mythology, and raw humanity into a spellbinding narrative. It’s melancholic and ethereal, but also warm, intimate, and deeply alive. It’s folk music made with spirit and an almost supernatural sense of atmosphere.
Recorded over six rain-soaked months in the living room of their 120-year-old Blackbird Manor, the album has the kind of handmade authenticity you can’t fake. You can hear the house in the music, the creaks and the quiet, yet the bond between the sisters forms the backbone of everything. The process was intuitive. One sister starting a piano or guitar idea, another building it out, lyrics rising only once the music had formed its emotional shape. It’s a rare alchemy, the sort that can only come from a family whose creative language runs deep.
The concept behind The Great Dying is ambitious but remarkably cohesive. Inspired by the Permian extinction, the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history, the sisters craft the story of a girl descending into the shadowed realms of grief, loss, and hell. Greek mythology meets the ache of lived experience, grief on both planetary and personal levels expressed as a lullaby to all that we lose and all that remains. It’s a bold premise, yet they execute it with such grace and clarity that the result feels both mythic and accessible.
Musically, the album is lush and transportive. Sad Dad Autumn moves fluidly between dark indie folk, softer rock, and sweeping post-rock crescendos, building worlds from delicate acoustics, layered pianos, and harmonies that feel like they’ve been sung together for a lifetime. The arrangements give each sister space to shine, yet everything blends into one unified voice, one shared emotional core. Their harmonies are especially striking: soft but powerful, haunting but comforting, like a warm hand in the dark.
Despite the heaviness of its themes, The Great Dying is full of beauty. Its melancholic tone never slips into despair, instead, it finds tenderness in sorrow and light in the corners of the abyss. This is an album meant for colder weather, for those classic Fall and Winter nights, for long drives, for quiet rooms. It invites the listener to sit with their own emotions, to breathe, to feel, and to let the music guide them down and back up again.
For a debut, it is astonishing. For three artists so young, it is revelatory. The Great Dying marks Sad Dad Autumn as a power trio of rare talent. This is not just an album to hear; it’s one to live with.
Normally we’d recommend a song or two to test it out, but you’d be a fool if you didn’t listen to the whole thing uninterrupted. Go ahead and click those links below to listen, follow along, and of course to stay tuned for more of their musical journey!
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