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Kodaline Say Goodbye With We Were Only Young — And Let One Voice Write the Ending

Their fifth and final album arrives as the first Kodaline record written entirely by one person.

Kodaline told fans in March 2026 that they were splitting once their next album was out — a strange way to build anticipation, announcing the ending before a single note of the record meant to close it had been shared. The first single, the title track "We Were Only Young," didn't land until the following month. That sequencing alone tells you something about how this album was made: the breakup came first, the music second, and the songs had to carry the weight of that decision retroactively.

Here's the twist that makes it worth paying attention to now, ahead of the full release. We Were Only Young is the band's fifth studio album, their first in six years since 2020's One Day At A Time, and — after four earlier records built the usual way, with the Dublin four-piece amassing chart hits, platinum records and streaming numbers in the billions as a genuine band effort — it's the first Kodaline album written entirely by frontman Steve Garrigan. A farewell record, and a solo-authored one. Those two facts sitting on top of each other are the real story.

## A Solo Pen, A Familiar Sound

The title track is a piano ballad — soaring vocal harmonies layered over orchestral instrumentation, the kind of arrangement that's unmistakably Kodaline on paper. Garrigan co-wrote it with producer Mads Christensen rather than going it entirely alone, which is a telling hedge: even with sole songwriting credit, he brought in someone experienced enough to keep the sound recognizable rather than let a change in process become a change in identity. For a closing statement, that's the safer and smarter move — reassure the audience before you ask them to say goodbye.

The second single complicates the picture in a good way. "Without You," released June 12, 2026, was co-written by Garrigan alongside Hugo Silvani and Benjamin Francis Leftwich — neither of them a Kodaline member. So "written entirely by Steve Garrigan" doesn't mean one man alone in a room; it means Garrigan choosing his own collaborators outside the band for the first time, rather than defaulting to bandmates by habit. That's a meaningfully different album-making process than anything else in the catalog, and it's a bigger deal than the farewell framing suggests on its own.

## Twelve Songs and a Long Goodbye

Spotify's release metadata puts the tracklist at twelve songs — a normal length for a Kodaline record, notably not stretched into a bloated victory lap. Restraint on the tracklist while expanding who gets a writing credit is a small, specific choice, and it suggests this was built to be heard in one sitting rather than treated as a career-spanning event in itself.

The goodbye extends past the record. A farewell world tour follows the album through Europe, Asia and Australia and the UK, after a run of Irish headline shows first — home before anywhere else, in front of an audience that already knows the catalog rather than one still being introduced to it. That's the shape of a tour built for people closing a chapter with the band, not one designed to open a new one.

What makes We Were Only Young worth queuing up now isn't the six-year gap since the last record, and it isn't the farewell tag either — both are just calendar facts. It's the tension sitting underneath the credits: a band ending as a democratic unit while its last songs were written more like a solo project with carefully chosen guests. Whether that reads as Garrigan stepping forward because the band was already stepping back, or as the exact arrangement that let Kodaline finish the story on its own terms, isn't something the tracklist can answer by itself. It's the question worth having in mind before the record actually lands.

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