Goodbyes & Goodtimes arrives as his first single since 2023, and the title track of a forthcoming nine-piece LP, and the distance between then and now feels loaded. The biographical scaffolding is difficult to ignore: the collapse of a long-term relationship, a hit-and-run accident that wrote off his car, a period of financial precarity severe enough to land him in said caravan on the fringes of rural England. These are not the romantic privations of a Shoreditch loft. This is actual difficulty, the kind that leaves marks.
And yet the song wears none of it obviously. The production — self-built, self-delivered — is stripped to the studs: a hip-hop-influenced groove that breathes without rushing, percussion that lands with the patience of someone who has learned not to panic. The arrangement trusts itself to do nothing more than necessary, which is a rarer and harder discipline than it sounds. There are moments when you catch a shadow of the Notorious B.I.G. in the rhythmic architecture, and elsewhere something of Lana Del Rey's gift for making dissolution feel somehow glamorous — though Goodbyes & Goodtimes is too plainspoken, too dry, to linger in glamour for long.
The vocal is where the thing lives. Comparisons to Mac Miller are understandable from a certain angle — the introspective hip-hop adjacency, the willingness to go inward — but Leaone's delivery lands closer to Johnny Cash's late-period economy: unhurried, considered, carrying weight without performing it. The song is, formally, a meditation on his own funeral and demise. Delivered by almost anyone else, this would be insufferable. Delivered here, with the kind of wry, deflating British understatement that refuses to let a dark thought settle too comfortably into profundity, it becomes something genuinely affecting.
The title itself telegraphs the central preoccupation: the coexistence of highs and lows, the disorienting simultaneity of the good and the bad arriving at the same door. Cycling alone through Suffolk countryside, Leaone found his way back to something essential — not inspiration in the theatrical sense, but a quieter, harder-won version of creative clarity. That solitude is audible. The track does not strain. It simply exists, confident in its own proportions.
The video, funded by the insurance payout from the very car you may have already seen crumpled in his Monaco visual — there is a pleasing circularity to that — extends the song's cinematic restraint into images. Leaone travelled to Los Angeles for the final mixing stages, enlisting Mitch Kenny to shape the album, and the result sits at an interesting geographic tension: rural English introspection, polished in Californian sunlight. It should not cohere as neatly as it does. That it does is, quietly, impressive.
Inspired in part by Daniel Johns' wildly ambitious FutureNever — an album similarly concerned with tearing down received ideas about what a solo artist can do — Leaone has made something that resists easy genre assignment without ever tipping into the studied eclecticism that so often results from that kind of ambition. This is not a record trying to be several things at once. It is one coherent, considered thing, shaped by circumstances that could easily have broken the whole enterprise.
The finest compliment one can pay Goodbyes & Goodtimes is that it sounds like nobody had to try too hard to make it — which is, of course, exactly the impression that requires the most effort to achieve. The chaos, apparently, has been transformed. The caravan, it turns out, was not a parenthesis at all. It was the whole point.