James Graham is not exactly holding up his role as lead singer of the Twilight Sad. The man known for songs like “And She Would Darken the Memory,” “I Became a Prostitute” and “Don’t Look at Me” sounds damned psyched on the phone as he crosses over the border from Canada into the U.S. This is their most buzzed-about tour yet, thanks to the overwhelmingly positive response to the new album No One Can Ever Know. The band took a risk with the album, which represents a big departure in their sound, and it seems to be paying off in a whole new wave of fans.

“It’s all been great,” says Graham. “Apart from the visa fiasco.”

Ah, finally, some gloom. Stories trickled across the Atlantic last month about the Twilight Sad’s visa problems, but no one seemed to have the whole story. Even the San Jose show on Wednesday (March 7) at the Blank Club seemed like it might be in jeopardy. But in the end, they only had to cancel the first two shows of the tour, and now Graham can explain the bureaucratic snafu they were up against—and what they had to go through to fix it.

“We were told two days before we meant to come over to America that the visas hadn’t been filed or something,” he says. “We basically went into a panic and tried to figure out the quickest way to get visas, and the quickest way was to go to Paris. It was a pretty expensive trip; we went to Paris and then played New York the same night. Pretty long day, but it was good, though. The New York show was amazing.”

Good? Great? Amazing? Where’s the guy who sang “Throw your eyes to the floor/You’re looking at the guilty one” and “The kids are on fire in the bedroom”? Actually, Graham turns out to have quite a sense of humor about himself, even as he explains that he likes touring now much more than he used to.

“I’m just enjoying it. As much as you can enjoy singing really fucking depressing songs all the time,” he says dryly.

Maybe it’s just a plot to keep American indie kids from getting even more depressed, but Scottish shoegazers the Twilight Sad had a hell of a time getting visas for their new U.S. tour, which comes to the Blank Club in San Jose on Wednesday, March 7. Things got so bad that the band had to cancel its first scheduled shows on the East Coast this week.

However, the rest of the tour—including the Blank Club date—looks to be locked in. The band didn’t say what caused the delay in processing their visas, but at least the darker, industrial-inspired songs on the new album No One Can Ever Know will give them a little release.

The popular Glasgow indie rockers are best known for their 2007 debut album, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters. Loud—like, My Bloody Valentine loud—in concert and packing interesting lyrics into songs like “That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy” (Stand By Me reference), the band was never a load of chuckles. But they’ve gotten increasingly dark in the five years since, on 2009’s Forget the Night Ahead, and now on the new record, which was released this month.

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