These days, life feels like a constant cycle of asking yourself ‘They made a country album?‘ From Post Malone to Beyoncé to Lana Del Rey, country music has been everywhere lately. Thanks to Hunting Season, the newest full-length album from Florida post-hardcore band Home Is Where, it’s even managed to find its place in the fifth-wave emo scene.
Now, is Hunting Season a country album? Absolutely not. It’s certainly an emo album, but it innovates a uniquely American breed of emo that bends and challenges the boundaries of the genre.
This record represents a relatively significant shift in the band’s sound that makes them a bit more accessible for a general audience through hopelessly catchy instrumental solos and (slightly) mellowed out vocals. Despite this, though, they manage to experiment tastefully without watering themselves down, compromising their identities, or alienating their fans.
Although the screams and abrasiveness that served as a foundation to their previous two records, The Whaler and I Became Birds, are toned down in Hunting Season, this release preserves the classic Home Is Where spirit. Vocalist and lyricist, Bea MacDonald, maintains her recognizable gritty, borderline spoken-word vocals à la Touché Amoré, Jeff Rosenstock, and La Dispute, while the rest of the group delivers the chaotic, harmonica-filled instrumental backing that fans know and love them for.
Despite the familiarity, each song possesses a distinct nostalgic quality that feels like Memorial Day barbecues and American-made pickup trucks.
Lead guitarist Tilley Komorny really shines here. Frankly, she is what gives Hunting Season its spark. Tracks like “Reptile House,” “Artificial Grass,” and “The Wolf Man” feature well-mixed pedal steel guitar licks and riffs that would fit seamlessly into a 60’s or 70’s folk country record. She and Komorny cite Hank Williams and Gram Parsons as some of their greatest influences during its inception.
“When we traveled as a band, the music that opened us up the most was country music like Parsons or Hank Williams. Listening to The Gilded Palace of Sin during the winter of ‘21 opened a new tour tradition: when the weather is nice, the sun is shining, hopes are high, I put on that record and without fail every time something memorable happens.”
Home is Where channels them in all the right ways while maintaining enough freshness to keep the cease-and-desist letters at bay. The entire album is loaded with prominent harmonica and guitar solos that would make their muses proud and have your uncle tapping his toes while he rides the pontoon boat.
Underneath the catchiness, however, I was often left with a pit in my stomach and an overwhelming nostalgia that had me longing for childhood summers and guilt-free patriotism.
MacDonald has demonstrated a consistent knack for writing creative lyrics that teem with depth and symbolism that hide under a deceptively simple, often bizarre surface. Hunting Season is no exception. According to record label Wax Bodega, each of the 13 tracks recounts the fiery deaths of different Elvis impersonators in unrelated car crashes—complete with their final thoughts. Each impersonator is unrelated to the next, but together they illustrate a larger picture of American absurdity through scenes out of a Hunter S Thompson or Chuck Palahniuk novel.
Nowhere else in the world will you find 13 iterations of the late King-of-Rock-and-Roll dying in a car accident. All 13 Elvises are presumably en route to work, making a living by performing a caricature of ‘real American rock and roll.‘ They’re probably working in the (admittedly fun) late stage capitalist adult Disneyland that is Las Vegas. I don’t think I can paint a more American picture.
Through powerful lyricism, each track unpacks America’s complexities, paradoxes, and our often bittersweet relationship with home. It’s important to note that Home Is Where hails from Florida and, although this record appeals to the greater American identity, it is very derivative of the band’s experiences growing up in The South.
Hunting Season is riddled with visions of a bleak future in a nation that becomes increasingly inaccessible and insists on eating itself and its citizens alive economically and culturally. “Black Metal Mormon” explores our jadedness and loss of naive childlike optimism with lines like ‘I remember when we thought that it could get better. Were we dumb or were wе sweet? What’s the difference, really?‘
In true Home Is Where fashion, dramatic but hard hitting critiques of capitalism and our need to be a cog in the machine loom throughout, like in the line ‘I’d never want to live forever, I’d still have to go to work‘ on “Migration Patterns”. The record’s final track, “Drive By Mooning” sums up the contentious relationship with America represented by this album, lamenting ‘I love you, but sometimes you’re the worst person I’ve ever met. I love you, but sometimes I’m the worst person I’ve ever been.‘
Between Hunting Season and PUP’s Who Will Look After The Dogs?, upbeat, quirky, danceable songs loaded with unexpectedly intense melancholic and existential lyrics seem to be a theme this year in the punk and emo space. This is clear on songs like “Mechanical Bull” and “Artificial Grass” that make us feel like we’re listening to live music at a Texas dive bar where we might not even notice the lyrics about death or the distant screams drowned out by honky-tonk steel guitar.
We know that we are living in unprecedented times and are consistently left wondering how long the American Empire can survive like this—why would we dwell on it when we can dance to some good music? If there’s one thing the U.S. did right, it’s rock and roll. In the words of André 3000: ‘Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance.‘
I can’t stop talking about this record. It grows on me even more with each listen—innovative, powerful, genre-bending modern emo music at its finest. MacDonald said it best when she described Hunting Season as “an album that you can grill to, and also cry to—well, not cry, but feel something.”
Even if the unconventional vocals on the first track throw you off, stick around. This album is a wild ride and will very well be a contender for my favorite record of the year. Can’t wait to see what Home is Where has in store next.
