TOTAL FUCKING DARKNESS – “THIS IS THE LAST TIME”
INDEPENDENT
Total Fucking Darkness return with “This Is The Last Time,” a skyscraping piece of electronic pop schmaltz about letting go, following your dreams, and setting your heart on fire. Epic and yearning in equal measure, the track finds Torquil Campbell, Stephen Ramsay, and Tom McFall shamelessly reaching toward pop transcendence while remaining acutely aware of how ridiculous that pursuit can be. It’s taken from Total Fucking Darkness’ upcoming new album, set for release in 2027.
When asked what inspired it, Ramsay offers a characteristically economical answer: “New Order.”
“This Is The Last Time” arrived with similarly little ceremony. Ramsay had barely made it through the instrumental once before Campbell had the lyrics ready. “It may as well be called ‘Real Time’ because Torq wrote this in real time,” Ramsay explains. “By the time I played him the instrumental once, he had written the lyrics.”
For all the band’s instinctive irreverence, the song reaches for something sincere beneath the electronic grandeur. “This Is The Last Time” is about the point where letting go becomes forward motion: following whatever dream remains, committing to it completely, and accepting that sometimes the only sensible response to uncertainty is to set your heart on fire and see what survives.
Sonically, the track looks backward to move forward. Total Fucking Darkness have always harboured an unresolved obsession with late-’80s and early-’90s electronic music, and “This Is The Last Time” pushes that fixation toward its biggest pop instincts. There are no software shortcuts hiding beneath the surface either. “No plug-ins, anywhere. This track is all analog, baby.” The result is unapologetically oversized electronic pop: yearning, melodic, synthetic, and built with one eye permanently fixed on an imagined past.
Had they released it in 1991, he argues, somebody would currently be sitting on a yacht in the Mediterranean rather than answering interview questions from a Starbucks bathroom. History has denied them that opportunity. “This Is The Last Time” will have to do.
Total Fucking Darkness is the meeting point of Torquil Campbell, member of Stars, Stephen Ramsay, the vast and soft mind behind Young Galaxy, and studio genius and synthesist Tom McFall.
The story of TFD is eternally the story of thwarted Canadians with unresolvable Anglo-industrial fantasies: men yearning for the post-industrial Manchester of 1992, where 20,000 former football hooligans might conceivably be found raving on ecstasy in a sheep field. Somehow, whenever they attempt to return, the plane lands in Winnipeg. Their songs continue the futile pursuit regardless, chasing electronic euphoria, pop glory, and the faint possibility that technology might briefly function as intended.
At this point, the attempt to scale the mountain of pop glory should probably be over. The mountain won. Base camp is full of skeletons yet Total Fucking Darkness remain, staring stubbornly into the abyss. On “This Is The Last Time,” however, the void sounds suspiciously like a hit song.
ARTIST QUOTE
“Every band says their latest music is the best thing they’ve ever done. It’s obviously cliché at this point and therefore categorically untrue in almost all cases, but I’m telling you, this is the best song we’ve written.”
Total FuckingDarkness
[Single]
(iIndependent)
Release Date: October 15, 2026
Artist Links
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