Kodaline Say Goodbye the Only Way They Know How, and It's Their Finest Hour

There's a particular kind of courage in walking away while the room is still full. When Steve Garrigan, Mark Prendergast, Vinny May and Jason Boland announced in October 2025 that they were ending Kodaline, they said they wanted to "end on a high." Plenty of bands have written that line in a press release and then delivered something tired. Since then Kodaline have played to 40,000 people at home in Ireland and taken a farewell tour across Asia, Australia and Europe. And they've made a record that actually keeps the promise.

The story goes back further than most people remember. Garrigan, Prendergast and May started out as 21 Demands, school friends from Swords in north Dublin, back in 2005. They became Kodaline in 2012, landed on the BBC's Sound of 2013 shortlist, and released In a Perfect World. The debut went to Number One in Ireland and gave the world "All I Want," a song that has soundtracked more break-ups, TV montages and first dances than anyone could count. Coming Up for Air, Politics of Living and One Day at a Time followed, each trying, with mixed success, to step out of that first record's shadow. We Were Only Young finally stops trying, and that's exactly why it works.

The comparisons have always come easily: Coldplay's piano grandeur, Keane's earnestness, the stadium-sized sincerity of U2. They're not wrong, but they miss a more interesting family resemblance. Listen to the title track, a piano ballad Garrigan co-wrote with Mads Damgaard Christensen. He sings it like a man reading old letters, and the closer relative is SYML. Brian Fennell has built a career on exactly this register: grief and memory carried on piano, the voice so close to the microphone that you hear the breath before the line. When I reviewed SYML's Nobody Lives Here for Maxazine last year, what struck me was that he wasn't trying to beat the album before it. He let the record be a natural next step, and it kept growing with every listen. Fennell called the tour behind it How It Was It Will Never Be Again. It could be the subtitle of this album.

Kodaline have stopped trying to escape their debut. They've made peace with it, and that peace is the sound of this record.

That's the key to We Were Only Young. Across twelve songs and some forty minutes, Kodaline look back on love, friendship and their own decade together from the distance that only age and regret can give. Christensen and Philip Magee keep the production uncluttered. Piano, acoustic guitar, strings and the odd saxophone each get their own space, and Garrigan's voice always sits at the front. Opener "Who Will Save You Now" starts almost devotional, then marches into a full-band swell with backing vocals the size of a Croke Park terrace. "Back to Me" lets its dynamics rise and fall with the lyric, as if Garrigan is trying to get every word out before the door closes. "Without You," which he wrote for his wife to sing at their wedding, is the plainest thing here, just ringing acoustic guitar and a lonely saxophone. It's also one of the most moving.

The best writing comes when the band get specific. "Hindsight" is the album's emotional core, placing regret in real things: a bathroom floor, a stranger's bed, a friend who keeps calling. "Learn to Lose" does something similar with photographs, an old chair and rain on the window. In these songs Kodaline stop gesturing at feelings and pin them down.

Then there's "Vultures," the one real curveball. It has a driving beat, dark imagery and a slowed-down bridge that makes the last chorus land like a punch. It's the closest Kodaline have come to menace, and you can already hear it shaking the rooms on this farewell run.

The formula has turned into craft.

Is the formula visible? Of course. By the third song you know the shape: a sparse opening, a gathering rhythm, the strings arriving, the release. "All I'll Ever Need" and parts of "Get Me High" settle for devotion so broad it could belong to anyone. Some critics have called the album too smooth, and on paper they have a point. But a farewell album isn't the place to start reinventing yourself. It's the place to say, as clearly as possible, this is who we were. Kodaline have always been a band of open hearts and big choruses, and here they're better at it than they've ever been.

Closer "The One for Me" ends things quietly, with keys, a faint synth and a wistful vocal. There's no grand final chord. It sounds like four friends switching off the lights in a studio they won't be coming back to.