Two Suns in the Sunset

Lyrics:

In my rear view mirror the sun is going down
Sinking behind bridges in the road
And I think of all the good things
That we have left undone
And I suffer premonitions
Confirm suspicions
Of the holocaust to come.

The wire that holds the cork
That keeps the anger in
Gives way
And suddenly it's day again.
The sun is in the east
Even though the day is done.
Two suns in the sunset
Hmmmmmmmmmm
Could be the human race is run.

Like the moment when the brakes lock
And you slide towards the big truck
"Oh no!"
"[scream] Daddy, Daddy!"
You stretch the frozen moments with your fear.
And you'll never hear their voices
And you'll never see their faces
You have no recourse to the law anymore.

And as the windshield melts
My tears evaporate
Leaving only charcoal to defend.
Finally I understand the feelings of the few.
Ashes and diamonds
Foe and friend
We were all equal in the end.

"...and now the weather. Tomorrow will be cloudy with scattered showers
spreading from the east ... with an expected high of 4000 degrees
Celsius"

"Two Suns in the Sunset" is the closing track on Pink Floyd's twelfth studio album The Final Cut (1983), and Roger Waters' final chronological contribution to the band, before leaving in 1985.

Since there was no promotional tour for The Final Cut, and this album was entirely ignored by Gilmour, Wright and Mason during the tours for A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell, "Two Suns in the Sunset" was never performed live by Pink Floyd. However, Roger Waters, as a solo artist, premiered the song almost 35 years after its release in a concert from the Us + Them Tour, held on 17 October 2018 at Itaipava Arena Fonte Nova in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Waters also played it in 2022 on his 2022–23 tour This Is Not a Drill.

Lyrics and music

Partway through the song, the lyric "the sun is in the east, even though the day is done" refers to the glowing fireball of a nuclear explosion. The song was partly inspired by Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film Ashes and Diamonds (Polish: Popiół i diament).

Session drummer Andy Newmark plays drums on this song, as Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason felt unable to perform its complex time signature changes. The song begins and ends in 9/8 time, while the majority of the song is in 4/4 (or common time), and it is punctuated with added measures of 7/8 and 3/8. Adding to the complexity, the main theme of the rhythm guitar has chords changing emphatically in dotted eighth notes, so three eighth-note beats are divided equally in two. This is not unlike what "Mother", from Pink Floyd's previous studio album, The Wall (1979), does, and on that song, Mason relinquished the drumming duties, in that case to Jeff Porcaro.

Critical reception

In a review for The Final Cut, Justin Gerber of Consequence described "Two Suns in the Sunset" as "the album's crowning achievement."

Toby Manning was less enthusiastic in his retrospective review, saying that this was the one song off The Final Cut where the musician Waters couldn't stay on the same level as the conceptualist Waters.