Being a DIY band is difficult. Being a DIY emo band is somehow even harder. Despite the razor-thin margins, countless hours spent cooped up in a van, and a career-stalling pandemic, Stars Hollow have managed to make it over a decade by creating a distinct blend of post-hardcore and Midwest emo that combines meaty screams, twinkly guitar parts, and emotionally crushing lyrics. The group’s latest effort, Kind of Hoping, is also their last: a fully realized and completely self-released record that is riffy, loud, and deeply introspective. It is a true swan song, as after this weekend the band will have played their final show and will be put to rest. Even if this weren’t the case, each track of this record drips with a sense of finality that asks you to look at the life you’ve lived and decide if it was the one you wanted.

Throughout their discography, Stars Hollow have consistently written around themes of loss, struggling to find acceptance, and the cyclical nature of trauma. That’s no different on Kind of Hoping, a 35-minute album meant to take you through the kind of mental health episode where you feel like you are falling, just hoping that someone will be there to catch you. By the time you reach the final track, you have been asked to reflect on the nature of your very existence in a way that inspires growth and makes you feel like, even if nobody is there, that you can catch yourself.

To put Kind of Hoping into the broader context of Stars Hollow’s entire discography, this record doesn’t necessarily feel like a new era for the band, but rather the culmination of something they’ve been building since their first EP. It all began with Tyler Stodghill, the group’s singer, lead guitarist, and our primary point of view as the audience. The project began as a three-piece but was a rotating cast for the first couple of years before eventually settling in with Andrew Ferren on drums and Em Bussanmas on bass and backing vocals. However, when it came to creating this final album, it became necessary to add a fourth member, and Louie Barlaw (Tiny Voices, Endswell) joined the band to add additional depth to the guitar parts.

On the band’s debut, I’m Really Not That Upset About It, the trio were blending bouncy emo riffs with raw screamed vocals. This expanded into an even more Midwest emo sound on 2018’s Happy Again, with Stodghill’s vocals sounding much cleaner and more refined. That EP also served as something of a breakthrough for the band as they honed in on powerful hooks that immediately sounded like they were destined to be screamed back by a bunch of folks in a sweaty moshpit in someone’s basement.

Things really started to blow up for the band with “Tadpole” in 2019, a loud and heartfelt song about wanting to change. Stars Hollow has always been penning strong, deeply emotional lyrics, but this was the first time you could hear the sound of community behind each word, and that came to life as the band toured relentlessly, including a jaunt across the country with fellow emo band Origami Angel. All of this came before their first record, I Want To Live My Life, dropped in 2021 right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. This release window meant the band never got to properly tour on this LP they’d been writing for years.

Three years later, Stars Hollow picked themselves up and dusted themselves off with In the Flower Bed, an EP which showed another side of the band with songs like the title track, which eschews screams entirely as the band sings about trying to move on from the past and understand that they are worthy of the space that they take up. It was In The Flower Bed that finally helped me accept my non-binary identity and know that I am allowed to be who I am – that I can kill who I was to become something new. I identified with the record so much that I took the line “I want to kill who I was back then” and made it the title of my poetry chapbook. It changed my life and made me jump at the chance to cover their last record, Kind Of Hoping.

Stars Hollow has always meant a lot to me because I can consistently listen to any song in their discography and find some part of myself reflected. I hear songs like “Catch Me” or “Flip Phone” and relate to their messages of hope in the face of pain and loneliness. “Catch Me” is incredibly relatable for anybody who has always reached out for others, yet never had someone willing to grab them as they fell. The instrumentation adds to this feeling as it begins with Stodghill wailing through some distorted guitar static that adds a sort of underwater sound to each word. It eventually opens up into emo-fueled twinkles and bouncy riffs that would have even the most tame concertgoers ready to grab the mic and scream their heart out.

“Flip Phone” recognizes that pain is a privilege and the fact that any of us feel anything is a cornerstone of humanity. The track starts a little slower, building from a single repeating guitar riff into a bouncy drum pattern that lies under one of the few sections of vocals on this record that aren’t screamed. This song explores the idea of having gone through trauma and pain and wanting to reach out to anybody near you while simultaneously being afraid of actually accepting hope and love. Lyrics like “I can’t stand it, I can’t handle the things you could do to me” highlight that when you give yourself to anybody, you are putting yourself in the palm of their hand where one squeeze would shatter you into little glass pieces. Yet despite that, you still need to love, and this song ends with maybe the most powerful lyrics on the entire album as it fades out with “I’m just like you / All and nothing / I am searching / For all in nothing.” There is something distinctly human about accepting that you have to continually drop your shield and open yourself to pain in order to finally break the cycle that you’re stuck in.

Four tracks into the record, lead single “Casper” begins a run that departs from the post-hardcore influences, leaning instead into a Turnover-inspired dark shoegazey sound. The song is named after Stodghill’s cat, who sadly passed away before this song was released. Everybody at some point in their life believed it would be so much easier if you could just live the life of your pet–this song is for those people who just want to get away from the pain of existence. On the Beers With The Bands podcast, Stodghill described it as a “coworker song” that anybody could enjoy as it departs from the traditional Stars Hollow post-hardcore screams.

With this album, Stars Hollow have created a space where it’s okay to struggle and, in doing so, remind you that you aren’t alone in your feelings. The song “Play Pretend” begins through my headphones, and I am back again sitting in my childhood bedroom practicing my smile so nobody looks past it to see the lack of light in my eyes. This song is also a bit of a departure from Stars Hollow’s traditional sound as it leans more pop-punk but is still reminiscent of Armor For Sleep and other post-hardcore bands. It carries more clean vocals than other tracks and has a high-pitched guitar playing throughout the entire song, almost like a siren that gives a strong sense of urgency, amplified by the steady drumbeat pounded out by Andrew Ferren.

A similar emotion hits me during “Blue Heron,” and I realize that I have been trying so hard for so long to, as the lyrics put it, “make the best of broken wings.” I think we all want to be better, to wake up every day and feel like we are where we are meant to be, and that feeling is omnipresent across the album. Stars Hollow asks you to look at your life and make the best of it, not in spite of the parts that suck, but because of them. This is one of the louder tracks on Kind of Hoping, and it has a plodding guitar that makes the meaty screams from both Stodghill and Em Bussanmas stand tall despite the soundwall around them. It is a perfect moshpit song that will have emo kids around the world dancing, especially with its pauses toward the end that feel like you’re being punched in the brain as the band expertly punctuates explosions of sound and screams with silence for a nice little beatdown passage to close things out.

The third song that departs from that post-hardcore style is “Taunt,” which leans heavily into a more emo sound. Even when the song opens up, it remains gentle and sounds exactly like the feeling of depression. For me, “Taunt” is the eye of the storm, which fits perfectly as the midpoint of Kind of Hoping.

Entering the final stretch of the album, “Ult” begins with a spoken part that wouldn’t feel out of place in a La Dispute song before it explodes into a wall of sound that threatens to drown out the wails of both Stodghill and Bussanmas. This song sticks out to me because I am a “survivor,” and I have always felt so unattached to the word even though, by definition, it's true. I feel like I am stuck carrying around baggage that nobody cares to learn about. Nobody looks at me and sees the past, and it leads me to being consistently invalidated for my experiences, and it means so much to hear that I am not the only person on earth who feels like this.

Stars Hollow doesn’t give you answers but rather closes the album with questions on “Over.” I’m not sure if the band knew this would be their final release when they were recording it, but, regardless, this track has a strong sense of finality to it. The music is slower and more intentional than almost all the rest of the record. Throughout the closing track, listeners are asked to think about how they have lived their life. The most impactful questions for me are in the second verse when Stodgehill asks, “If you could feel the things you never felt / if you could guarantee you’d still be held / what would it change about the way / you hold your weight?” This song, like all things, inevitably ends after all the lyrics pass. The instrumental plays out until that too fades and you are left with nothing other than the sound of your own breathing.

After all the reflection this album asks of you, it is worth asking if you are on the path to becoming who you want to be. Even though all my bad decisions and tough moments play “over and over and over again” in my head, I don't regret my mistakes and the pain that I have felt because it led me to this moment telling you about some songs I love. This album makes me want to be a better version of myself and gives me a hope I always fear that I will lose.

Coming into this review, I had a lot on my mind and have since moved halfway across the country on my own. I was struggling to make changes and accept that some things must be temporary. A lot of that feeling went away when I sat in my living room and listened to this record for the first time. I finally felt seen for the first time in a long time.

This band’s final act is going to inspire a generation of artists to pick up a guitar and start exploring their feelings on a notepad. Even if those people never play a show or record a piece of music, that exploration is inherently good. The fact that this band was able to survive as long as they have while the members led full lives is an incredible act of fortitude and goes to show that you can have a life in music without making it your entire life.

Stars Hollow now must go into the same flowerbed that they once sang about as their time comes to an end–however, from the corpse will grow gorgeous flowers that will remain for future generations. The lessons and memories will forever be etched into the same dirt in which they are buried.

Ben Parker is a writer, poet, and student affairs administrator located in Colorado. They have been a minor niche internet celebrity, performed with multiple of their favorite bands, and been lucky to have made friends across the country.

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Stars Hollow – Kind of Hoping | Album Review