Hello, Goodbye? Adopting the promotional methods often exploited by bands from the capital – i.e not releasing music for a hot second – Brighton’s Goodbye have been playing a long game over the last 18 months. They’ve been slotting onto the bills of numerous UK festivals, carefully plotting their hometown sell-out headlines, and have been warming up stages for some of indie’s latest treasures – Lambrini Girls, Lime Garden, mary in the junkyard, Bdrmm, Fantasy of A Broken Heart…
Now, they close off 2025 and announce themselves for the new year with long-awaited debut single, ‘Meat’. Delivering their self-styled brand of agitated dream-pop, Goodbye lift all the genre’s jangles, washes, and cinematic flourishes, but gut out all of its ethereality and escapism. With Megan Wheeler’s vocal pushed to the forefront – delivering an enigmatic yet uncompromising missive on the objectification of women by men – the ‘dream’ in Goodbye’s ‘dream-pop’ is of the uncanny, destabilising variety; the kind of dreams where you wake up emotionally rung out, like your subconscious has taken you out on a psychic voyage through the insecurity of night, stranding you in a limbo between knowing, and not.
It’s also a dream-pop that feels distinctly British too. Rather than drifting into a wall-of-sound shoegazing extremities, Goodbye keep things sparse, spiky and direct – think the pared back arrangements of The Sundays or the gloomy crashes of The Smiths in 1984. Let’s see where it takes them in 2026.
Photo by Annie Dorrett
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