POST ANIMAL // LAST GOODBYE: A Song for the Ones Who Never Got to Say It
- syn devereaux
- Apr 17, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 22, 2025
Post Animal’s newest track stirs up the dust of old lives and new beginnings.
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Last Goodbye– Post Animal’s new single off their upcoming album, Iron– has me feeling like I'm a lonely troubadour, longingly staring out a fifth-wheel bus window, post show, dust on my boots, questions on my mind.. A sweet, but rough around the edges desperado, meeting a cosmic tumble weed for answers at a fork in the road of loss and indecision. Existential, but not enough to spiral. The bass and drums feel reminiscent of The Police’s 1983 Every Breath You Take and just when you think you’re going to go in one direction, the steel guitar takes you into a sharp left turn and mood.
As a fellow early 30-something, I’ve got most of this down pat. (Especially the yearning out the window part. I’m a real pro. Ask anyone.) I’m even wearing my red cowgirl boots, black bandana around my neck and black washed “cowboy” jeans. Born and bred in the wild wild west, this song feels personal. It’s windswept desert Americana that you couldn’t ignore if you tried.
As midwest Chicago based boys— consisting of Dalton Allison, Jake Hirshland, Javi Reyes, Wesley Toledo, Matt Williams— and sometimes Joe Keery— I’m not sure how they managed to tap into a well of personal memories of riding in my grandpa's single-cab Chevy S10 pickup truck, chasing canteen fish or searching for hundred year-old treasure (see also: mining camp junk). Funnily enough, I wrote about the canteen fish just a few days ago— a family fable turned personal folklore. It’s been living at the edge of my mind ever since. This song is an echo of those memories bleeding into my reality. The synchronicity of this poem being written days before the song’s release is not lost on me. No accidents— a personal creed and motto tattooed on my arm— rings loudly like a bell in my ears. Music finds you exactly how and when it does.
This song is reminiscent of the long stretch of desert sagebrush, yucca and cacti lining the two lane highway into the city of Sin. A shared name, but something that was never mine to call home. It calls to me— my desert roots— but I never pick up the phone. This song makes me want to do just that. Reminding me of that same stretch of road under the stars I rode with my brother and his best friend in a long held memory. Oh how I worried that that was the last goodbye. A fragile trip to save my baby brother, feeling infinite under the stars, hanging out a car window in spring– it’s an emotional call back to a place I so desperately want and have tried to forget.
Last Goodbye is the second track off their upcoming album Iron, set to release on July 25, 2025. The full gang is on the track and album, with Joe Keery coming back into the fold of banded brothers. You can hear the harmonies and the growth of their sound and brotherhood throughout the track. They’re no longer early 20-somethings in Chicago basements and club venues. They’re men, growing up, changing with the throes of life. Keery’s harmonies at the beginning of the chorus are so subtle, you almost miss them unless you know what to listen for. Blending with bandmates, Javi Reyes and Jake Hirshland's distinct and vastly different voices.
This song feels like a vintage, beat up postcard you find in a hole-in-the-wall antique shop in the middle of nowhere. One that you write to yourself and forget about until you receive it weeks or months later. It’s the type of song that feels like campfire and smoke, swirling around you, sticking to you and your friends who’ve also walked the lonely path with and alongside you. It’s something you keep in your wallet and look back on, feel the worn corners in your hands. It says, “I’ve been places. I’m not bright and shiny anymore and that’s okay.”
The chorus rolls and settles in your bones like desert fog— soft, steady, and a little haunting, “Staying on fifth tonight/ I got a feeling like it's feeling like the last time/ Last goodbye/ And it don't feel right/ So what are we going to do tonight” rings like last call at your favorite dive bar that is closing— ending an era, yes— but speaking deeply to the transience of life on the road.
Living out of suitcases, never quite knowing what lies ahead. Any day, any show, any pit stop could be the last time. The emotional toll and bandwidth that takes on your mind and body. It’s a feeling I’ve grown acutely intimate with myself— just not in the way you’re thinking. It’s a hard translation to execute, but the Post Animal boys do a spectacular job of channeling that hopelessness into something raw and act as a mirror you can put in your earbuds and walk the night to.
First Listen:
Listening on a bus, when you’re hearing about a fifth-wheel is a special kind of poetry that happens to write itself.
When you leave a place,
sometimes you don’t realize if or when it’ll be your last goodbye. I always tell people that I’m a better person for not returning to the southern Nevada desert. The shallow roots of weeds and cacti, much like my own familial kind. Its literal and figurative landscape is seeded in trauma and abandonment ache, yet this song– this song has me feeling those warm summer nights in a different light. Achey, yes, but not in the same way.
“I don't dream what I dreamed back then/ I just feel what I feel right now/ Special place where I/ Now I'm racing for what to do/ All roads lead me back to you/ Know my life's been changing but I'll be pacing/ Back on the road again” How music seems to just find you when you need it most will never not amaze me. However, hearing this single this morning on the NJ Transit bus to NYC– after I had a particularly nightmarish dream about my family, is nothing short of kismet. A gentle balm, both sonically and lyrically, these six guys mastered what it feels like to ask the question of, “Is this really the last goodbye? Who am I after this ends?”
This song feels like the final, last goodbye to my family that I never got to give. I’ll never smell the Mesquite trees blooming or looking to the mountains I knew like the back of my hand as my compass. I’ll never be sixteen again, hiding on my family home’s roof, watching for shooting stars and wishing I was in New York City, listening to the crickets and coyotes howling; lost with my iPod touch in hand and the world shut out. But damn, does this song bring me right back there once again, even if for four minutes and eleven seconds. The beautiful irony is that instead of being 16, I’m 32, living in my favorite city that I dreamed to live in for so long and I’m finally in a place that feels like home.
I’m finally free.
And as Penny Lane, original Band-Aid in Almost Famous reminds William Miller during the Tiny Dancer scene, “you are home.”
Yeah. Yeah, I am— both in the Big Apple and in music. Music has always been home on the inside. Now, it finally matches the outside too. New York: my favorite city in the world.
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Thank you to the Post Animal boys for creating a body of work that takes the pain out of nostalgia and allowing me to go back home, even if just a few minutes; even if just in my head.
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