Seventeen years of not fitting in, and Citizen have never sounded more like themselves…
Words by Cydnee Brook | Aug 04, 2026
Seventeen years in, Citizen still sound like a band that’s never fully trusted the room they’re standing in, and that’s precisely what makes Halcyon Blues land. “We’ve never easily known where we belong,” Mat Kerekes says of the band’s early years, when they couldn’t even get booked without someone asking what kind of band they actually were. Their restless persistence used to read as a liability. Now, on their sixth album, Halcyon Blues doesn’t pick a lane so much as it proves Citizen were building something this whole time: post-hardcore menace, anthemic alt-rock, and garage-pop shimmer.
Opener “Good Fortune” sets the tone immediately, and it’s a smart choice of terms. There’s a real charge to the way it plays out, two people who are bad for each other, or bad together, circling the idea of walking away and choosing not to, again and again. It’s less a breakup song than a song about the gravitational pull that makes breaking up impossible, and Citizen give it the kind of technicolour urgency that Kerekes and Nick Hamm describe as the record’s whole ethos: huge rock songs built for huge, unresolved feelings. “I Can See You from Here” follows and immediately downshifts into something more reflective; chill isn’t a word this band earns often, but it fits here, and the sequencing does real work letting the record breathe before it asks more of you.
The title track, Halcyon Blues, clearly stands out, and not because it’s the loudest or the hookiest song; it’s the one where the album’s central idea, that things falling apart might still have been meant to happen, gets its most direct and devastating treatment. Kerekes has said the record is “about unexpected change,” about thinking you have everything figured out right before you very much don’t, and “Halcyon Blues” is the song that sits inside that feeling instead of just describing it. It’s bittersweet in the specific way that only makes sense in hindsight, and it’s the moment the album earns its title.
Elsewhere, the record reaches back further than its title track lets on. “Is It in My Brain” is the clearest throwback here, tapping into a specific 2012-era emo pulse that longtime fans will clock instantly, proof that Citizen can still access their roots. It sits comfortably alongside the more scorched-earth cuts like “Matador” and “Smooth Talker,” which the band has described as tapping pent-up resentment and against the widescreen ambition of “Highs and Lows,” where synth strings and a towering chorus push the band into genuinely arena-sized territory. Mixed by Tom Lorde-Alge, the record has the polish to support those bigger swings without losing the ferocity of Citizen’s earlier work, a needle they thread more successfully than most bands attempting the same “everything we’ve ever been” move this deep into a catalogue.
Where the album stumbles slightly is in its middle stretch, where some tracks lean on the same emotional register and dynamic palette closely enough that they start to blur into one another rather than distinguish themselves. It’s a minor complaint, and one that’s almost baked into the album’s ambition: when your goal is to fold seventeen years of evolution into a single cohesive statement, some individual songs are going to serve the whole and get lost a little. And Halcyon Blues is, above all, a cohesive piece of work. It plays like a project rather than a collection of singles, closing on the cinematic “Anne” with the sense of a band that has genuinely arrived somewhere.
What separates Halcyon Blues from their other records is that the songwriting and thematic construction have genuinely levelled up. Past Citizen albums often felt like reactions to whatever was happening in that moment; this one feels authored, something that can only be made once you’ve lived life and created albums. They’ve gotten better, and it shows. The hooks are sharper; the emotional architecture is not only there but fleshed out.
Nick Hamm put it simply: Citizen never had the “red-hot rocketship thing.” What they had instead was patience, and a refusal to repeat themselves, and Halcyon Blues is what that patience sounds like paying off. It’s not a flawless record; a few tracks fade into the ones around them rather than standing apart, but it’s a genuinely confident one, and among this band’s most rewarding, with songwriting and thematic depth that outpaces anything in their catalogue to date. For a group that spent years being told they didn’t fit anywhere, Halcyon Blues sounds exactly like Citizen, and like no one else.
Verdict: 💀💀💀
For Fans of: Title Fight, Balance and Composure, Basement
Halcyon Blues drops August 7th, via Run For Cover Records
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