Thin Lear
Many Disappeared
First City Artists
Matt Longo’s Thin Lear returns with Many Disappeared, perhaps his best album yet — literary folk-rock that carries the soft fingerprints of artists such as Harry Nilsson and Leonard Cohen without succumbing to derivation.
It’s his first long player since 2020’s Wooden Cave, following two EPs — 2024’s A Beach of Nightly Glory and 2025’s A Shadow Waltzed Itself — and a run of singles that enhanced his appeal. Thin Lear has a knack for never overselling his sound. In his hands, “less is more” takes on significance.
With producer Matt Ross-Spang, Many Disappeared transforms tribulation into songcraft: a set of strange, self-written tales that use plot as a method to explore feelings. “I’ve always gravitated to bizarre tales to access my grief and pain,” Longo explains.
The opener, “Silver Bridge,” presents folk-rock as a narrative device, pulling from West Virginia’s “mothman” era and the bridge collapse that followed. Longo’s evocative voice is wonderfully easy to listen to.
“But I was there when Silver came down,” he sings, “Took out nearly half the whole town / In my dreams a swaying bridge / I wish that was all there is.”
The song blends the visually spectacular with feelings of dread.
“Mattoon” narrates the 1944 Illinois “Mad Gasser” panic, when residents reported a sweet-smelling gas that left them sick and briefly paralyzed. Longo writes it like a scene you can’t look away from.
“His eyes blood red and wild,” he sings, “As mother and her child sleeping apart / Backs turned to the window / As pesticides in billows cascading down / Ceiling to floor of the room.”
Across the album, he shows how fear and other emotions replicate, assuming a snowball effect. One person’s fear feeds another person’s fear, producing a tsunami of fear.
The most brutal song is also the simplest. “Witness” revisits a childhood moment — Longo and a friend finding a dying cat — and refuses to soften it.
“There we stood, two children at this summer tomb / Heard its final sputtered gasp as flowers bloomed.”
Longo says that the episode is “still a touchpoint for me, every time I come upon the same powerless feeling, whether it be the loss of a loved one or the general anxiety that the veil between this world and the next is quite thin.” Here, that thinness hums under everything.
For some reason, “A Cherished Man” summons up suggestions of Dan Fogelberg. Tender and emotionally sensitive to others.
Producer Matt Ross-Spang keeps the sound solid and unflashy, a perfect match for Longo’s self-discipline. The band — Will Sexton (guitar), Rick Steff (keys), Dave Smith (bass), and Ken Coomer (drums) — plays with economy, providing an accompanying matrix for the vocals rather than crowding them.
Two personal favorites: “Harmony & Gold” glows with dollops of ‘60s Motown, while “Buddy” adds country flavors without becoming synthetic. There’s a charming, poignant intimacy to the lyrics of “Buddy.”
“It’s only an old time, you see / And that’s all it can be / For palace or bar / But man, it can drag you so far.”
Many Disappeared makes its case through understatement. In a time when “authenticity” often means maximal disclosure, Thin Lear finds a quieter truth — stories sung with care, even when they end badly.
