Citizen’s last album, 2023’s Calling the Dogs, is the one nobody on the band’s own forums really wants to talk about: an indie-rock detour widely read as the least essential thing they’ve made in over a decade. Halcyon Blues doesn’t apologise for it. It just quietly proves the band remembers how to do everything else.
The Toledo, Ohio five-piece have spent over a decade refusing to sit still: emo-revival urgency on 2013’s Youth, grunge and shoegaze on Everybody Is Going to Heaven two years later, dance-punk electronics by 2021’s Life in Your Glass World. Halcyon Blues, their sixth album for Run For Cover, doesn’t pick one of those eras. It pulls from all of them at once.
Opener ‘Good Fortune’ sets the terms with a rumbling emo riff and loose, purposeful drums that throw the record into motion before there’s time for an introduction. ‘I Can See You From Here’ shifts gears almost immediately, the instrumentation wrapped in a genuine haze while Mat Kerekes’ voice cuts through it with more clarity than the mix around him seems to want to allow.
‘Either Way’ is the record’s best production choice: rather than pushing the strings into a supporting role, the arrangement gives every instrument roughly equal space, so no single part dominates and the emotional weight ends up spread across the whole mix instead of stacked on the vocal. The title track slows everything down further, opening as a plain, patient ballad before it lets loss creep into the lyric rather than announcing it. It’s the closest thing here to a mission statement: this is a record more interested in sitting with a feeling than resolving it quickly.
Not every track earns that same attention. ‘Matador’ gets the same crunchy, blistering production as the openers, but without a hook or an idea distinct enough to separate it from the record’s other high-energy moments, it plays more like a genre placeholder than a song built to stand on its own.
By closer ‘Anne’, all shimmering melancholy and a gentle fade rather than a big finish, the album has made its case. Calling the Dogs sounded like a band unsure which version of themselves to be. Halcyon Blues sounds like a band who worked out you don’t actually have to choose.
