Pitchfork

If teenage dreams are hard to beat, it's only because they're so vivid. I mean, adolescence has its own peculiar torments, and the tragedies and triumphs of those fraught hair-getting years seem to occur on a vast, existential scale: The first cut is the deepest, and then you drown in it. When ur-teenager Holden Caulfield finds the world full of phonies, he sets off trying to save children everywhere from its moral perils; in One Hundred Years of Solitude, young Aureliano Buendía discovers love and expresses it "in poetry that had no beginning and no end." Some of us just made asses of ourselves-- huge, Wreckx-N-Effect asses.

The debut from Glasgow's the Twilight Sad articulates youthful emotional grandeur with all the eloquence of hindsight. When scars become anthems, old wounds are never far beneath the surface. The quartet's five-song EP pierces singer James Graham's embattled burr and quixotic lyrics with guitars that shimmer, creak, and finally twist in upon themselves before crumbling, like a flame-ravaged house, into noisy rubble. With composer Max Richter co-producing, the Twilight Sad's dramatic use of space aligns them with arty labelmates like Animal Collective and Sigur Rós, and the EP's epic scope makes the group an angst-ridden younger brother to London avant-popsters Guillemots. Raise your lighters, y'all, but you're wearing headphones. And you're mad lonely.

So, kids today-- they all right? Happily, nah. "The kids are on fire in the bedroom," Graham sings amid accordion and earth-quaking drums on "That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy" (typical of the Twilight Sad's titles), about a troubled 14-year-old with a broken heart. During the trance-like cymbal swirl of "Last Year's Rain Didn't Fall Quite So Hard", Graham's narrator admits, "I only wanna say goodbye," while "3 Seconds of Dead Air" slowly crescendos through almost nine minutes, hearing secrets after everybody else and "holding on for too long"-- a welcome surfeit. Ah, yes: the Twilight Miserable.

Sure, but, in the best way. Like the Walkmen, the Twilight Sad rehabilitate the U2 stadium anthem by rescuing it from the post-Coldplay kingdom: the Glaswegian mopers through lip-quivering emotion punctuated with explosions rather than their New York peers' subway-wind exhortations. With a sound as big, aching, and volatile as their songs, the Twilight Sad remind us that adulthood-- soulless jobs that never pay enough, precious free time squandered accidentally hurting people you love, even sleepless hours locked in staring contests with an unblinking ceiling-- still isn't as generally crappy as becoming an adult. Nor, potentially, as exquisite.