José González – ‘Against the Dying of the Light’ album review : Stop me if you think you’ve heard this before
“Do not go gentle into that good night”, opens the famous and oft-quoted Dylan Thomas poem of the same name, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. José González is not somebody who ever sounds like he has very much rage inside of him, and especially so on his latest album Against The Dying Of The Light, despite what he might have said in the lead-up to the release.
The Skinny: The 13 tracks that make up González’s fifth album will not offer any surprises or shocks to anybody who has even a passing recollection of his older material. Against the Dying of the Light is less a new collection of songs than it is a continuation of everything that has come before from José González.
At first, this can seem a little disappointing; you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve heard all of these songs before and that there is nothing particularly special to separate them from his previous work, but, like all of his previous efforts, eventually, the hypnotic hush of repetitive guitar riffs and hazy, spaced out and echo-heavy vocals and warm, nostalgic use of atmosphere will wash over you and calm any doubts you might have had about the album.
Unfortunately, that same sense of familiarity can also play against the record as it progresses. There might be times when you have to double-check you haven’t accidentally hit the “repeat one” button on your streaming platform of choice (which, by the way, hopefully isn’t still Spotify) and gotten stuck in an eternal circle of the same song. Haven’t I just heard this riff – haven’t I just heard this sparse hammer-on hammer-off, stomp, clap, run up the fretboard and half-spoken half-sung lullaby lyric, mixed so low and so drenched in reverb that I could hardly make out what he’s singing or saying?
This is the risk when all your songs are written in the same tempo and the same key, sung in the same soft tones and covering similar lyrical ground – it becomes hard to differentiate when one song has finished and when the next one has begun, or why you need to listen to thirteen of them when you got the message after just one.
The effect can become almost trancelike and meditative, and there is a calming sense of harmony that can be achieved by getting lost in this music, if you don’t think about it all for too long and simply let it soak into your skin, into your bones and your brain. This is especially easily done when González starts singing in Spanish and in Swedish, not that either language sounds enormously all that different from the other (or, from his singing in English) on his tongue (González is fluent in all three, having grown up in Sweden as an Argentinian refugee).
Musically, the songs sound the same, but for the first time on the album, something almost noticeable has changed, and so it’s even easier to get lost in their ripples and their waves. It’s no wonder, then, that one of the most alluring tracks on the album, and one that finally attempts to adventure away from the by-now well established sonic sound palette is one of the Spanish language lyrics, ‘Ay Querida’, or that one of the most pleasant and pleasing melodies that González conjures up is the Swedish language ‘U / Rawls Slöja’.
And something has changed, too, when González returns to singing in English following the foreign-language portion of the album. The best, most distinct and most affecting songs are all back-loaded into the second half of the record. ‘Just a Rock’ finally introduces some dynamic range and tension into the otherwise harmonious whole of the album – so much for the rage invoked by the album’s title, this one is seemingly all about the light – and penultimate track ‘You & We’ is a heavenly, cascading stream of beautiful guitars, vocals and words.
For the release of Against The Dying Of The Light, González has pledged 10% of his earnings from the album to a range of organisations fighting against poverty, through the charity Giving What We Can.
Standout Track: ‘You & We’
The Verdict: The album, for all intents and purposes, might as well have been the very same track over and over again, just with seven different titles written on the record sleeve.
Release Date: March 27th, 2026 | Producer: José González | Label: City Slang
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