Smut – Tomorrow Comes Crashing | Album Review

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Bayonet Records

Look, Smut kick ass, plain and simple. Tomorrow Comes Crashing is the band’s third studio album, which puts the Chicago-based quintet back into the muck, returning to the sludgy sound of their debut. It’s a type of album where, when I hear the songs, I get a feeling that the band knows exactly who they are at this point and are firing on all cylinders toward that actualization. The group recaptures some of their original DIY aesthetics while also incorporating new tricks they’ve learned along the way.

Smut’s previous record, How the Light Felt, sifted through the intricacies of 1990s dream pop and alt-rock, with more of the songs erring on the dreamy side of things. They smoothed out the rough edges found on their debut for an enjoyable second entry in their catalog–it was as if The Sundays had a lost album that was discovered in an abandoned storage unit and finally made its way onto streaming services.

Tomorrow Comes Crashing has similar elements to their previous records but now includes monstrous eruptions of distorted rock that bring the band to an apex of their sound. Vocalist Tay Roebuck, guitarists Andie Min and Sam Ruschman, bassist John Steiner, and drummer Aidan O’Connor tap into the sonic influences of their predecessors to create 34 minutes of pure rock ecstasy. The first step to achieving this sound was to enlist Aron Kobayashi Ritch as the production assistant, who turned the volume up to max power, giving the songs enough electricity to make Ben Franklin blush. Ritch has been on a hot streak of his own this year, with credits on the recent albums from Momma, Bedridden, and Been Stellar.

The single, “Syd Sweeney,” is something I could easily imagine on a 90s episode of Beavis and Butthead with them shaking and gyrating on their couch while watching the music video in between calling each other “fart knockers.” The song has all the ingredients of a certified banger, from the fuzzed-out 90s guitar riffs to the sludgy thrash metal outro, accompanied by some expert wailing from Roebuck. Not only can you throw your neck out headbanging to the track, but dig into the lyrics, and you’ll find a message about the objectification and stereotypes of women in art. A-list actress Sydney Sweeney is the namesake evoked as the shining example of being uber-talented in her own right yet still viewed solely as a sex object by some. For me, the sign of a talented band is when you can combine engaging music with lyrics that convey a distinct message that holds meaning for the artists.

What stands out to me throughout Tomorrow Comes Crashing is the voice of Tay Roebuck, who has an incredible range, accompanied by an unpredictable Tasmanian Devil-like energy. Her versatility is evident across the album; you can hear someone go through all the emotions, from a yell to a cry to a plethora of blood-curdling screams. On the 90s-inspired ballad with an edge, “Dead Air,” Roebuck’s voice rides the wave of crisp basslines with such effortless ease. A few tracks earlier, on the explosive, twisting metal riff opener “Godhead,” she belts a horror movie-like yowl that offers a thrilling, speaker-rattling moment. 

There’s a lot of fun to be had on the in-between songs, “Burn Like Violet” has guitar riffs you would hear in an 80s action movie scene. When I hit play on that song, I can just imagine a shredded Patrick Swayze in a bar fight throwing a jabroni onto a table, sending them through a bevy of glass mugs. “Spit” is a rough and rowdy song laced with chunky metal riffs and the perfect amount of fuzz. Each track also hosts an intoxicatingly catchy chorus that makes me just want to keep hitting repeat nonstop.

“Ghosts (Cataclysm, Cover Me)” is the band tapping back into their dream pop sound, which, by the evidence of their second record, they are entirely at ease revisiting that brimming well of inspiration. The song has a moody, Gothic feel, accompanied by hauntingly executed echoes of Roebuck, making this a staple track that should be on everyone’s Halloween playlist this fall.

The realization of the trials and tribulations a band encounters while trying to live out their dreams is the focus of “Touch & Go.” The mid-album cut shows the things people don’t see beyond the shows, like flooded basements ruining your gear or inhaling burnt coffee in Anytown, USA, and having to manage your van breaking down while trying to make it to the next gig. The will it takes to persevere in your aspirations of becoming a full-time musician is harder than ever these days. Smut are well on the way to achieving their dreams by relentlessly evolving their sound to newer heights with each album cycle. The record itself is pure, unadulterated fun, but what separates this group from the pack are the detailed lyrical messages behind the kick-assery. While Tomorrow Comes Crashing feels expertly timed as a summer release with red-hot, sizzling guitar riffs and thunderous choruses, that depth beneath the surface is liable to keep drawing listeners back, rewarding them for many seasons to come.

David is a content mercenary based in Chicago. He's also a freelance writer specializing in music, movies, and culture. His hidden talents are his mid-range jump shot and the ability to always be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable at a party. You can find him scrolling away on Instagram@davidmwill89, Twitter@Cobretti24, or Medium@davidmwms.

Dance Myth – The Shapes We Make | Album Review

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Say-10 Records

When I was 19 years old, I first heard Listener’s album Wooden Heart Poems, and it made me realize that listening to music wasn’t good enough. Wooden Heart Poems was an invitation to write, and I needed to accept that invitation. I started writing my own songs and poems, often putting on Wooden Heart Poems as inspiration when I couldn’t find words on my own, borrowing lyrical motifs and stretching them until they resembled the shape of my own heart. Fifteen years later, I’m listening to Listener’s songwriter, Dan Smith, as he presents his new project, Dance Myth, and I’m struck once again as though I were still the 19-year-old finding er voice for the first time.

In many ways, The Shapes We Make feels like coming home, which is appropriate for a record that deals so much with death. Dan’s voice has hardly changed in the 15 years between my introduction and this new record, which makes this album feel deeply familiar from the first word said in the passionate spoken-word style that he’s built a career around. There’s a cadence to his vocal delivery that feels like a wave, scored by guitars, trumpets, synths, keyboards, and a multitude of other supporting instrumentation ebbing and flowing to create vast dynamic shapes that draw your attention towards the emotional urgency of his words.

If you miss some of the lyrics, as I’m sure many of us frequently do on initial listens of a record, you'll still catch that wave, but the true richness comes from diving in. Most of the record’s lyrics read like letters, diary entries, and memories. They’re correspondence between the writer, the listener, and unnamed third parties. The record reads as an invitation to converse with the music as it pleads, reassures, convicts, and comforts. In many ways, it echoes Levi The Poet’s 2014 release Correspondence: A Fiction, which similarly used dramatic scoring to support poetry about love and loss in the form of letters.

On The Shapes We Make, Dance Myth seems to speak directly to us, the listeners, imploring us to join in the shared humanity that makes us complete as people, flaws and all. In the album opener, “Gentle, Gentle,” you hear Smith plead, “Forgive yourself. If you can. For who you’ve been. You didn’t know then.” It’s an invitation to actively participate in the divine practice of grace rather than standing still in our regrets, our pasts, and our mistakes. This song offers a lesson I’ve had to learn time and again in therapy: to forgive oneself—a lesson that bears repeating, as it simply cannot be internalized the first time you hear it.

It’s often unclear whether Smith intends the songs and poems to be pointed at “you,” a specific individual, or “you,” the listener, but to my ears, it feels as though he’s speaking directly to my soul. It often feels as though Smith has chosen to sit down with each listener, allowing us to listen and meditate on the words he has carefully laid out. Even when the lyrics clearly show that a letter is for a specific individual whom the listener can never know, Smith still finds a way to make it feel universal in its specificity.

Lead single “Little Bird” reads like a eulogy, with Smith taking time to share about the pain of seeing a loved one leave this life. It serves as an apology to the subject of the song as he exclaims, “Sorry you couldn’t make it to where we were.” It isn’t all bleak, though. He celebrates the evaporation of life in death, referring to the dead as going “back into everyone I meet.” There’s a universality in the specificity of this piece, as we see a particular person cemented in the lyric. It begs us to share in the specificity that engulfs our lives, Smith confidently trusting that the listener can swap out the details to match their own loss, grief, and desire for peace.

We shift from grief to fear by track six, “This Accordion Life,” as there’s a palpable sense that something is wrong; Smith describes the way he’s seen by others as “just the shape of smoke from setting myself on fire” followed closely by exclaiming that tomorrow and the past are both terrifying. He leans on the hope of getting better, knowing that the only path forward is simply to keep going, a lesson that many minority groups have heard over and over in times of tribulation.

To speak personally for a moment, I want to mention that I’m a transgender woman, which has deeply shaped the way I view this record. In my experience, being trans is largely about self-identification. It’s about looking in the mirror and deciding who you want to be– no, rather, it’s about realizing who you are. Near the end of “This Accordion Life,” we hear Smith exclaim, “It’s embarrassing. All the times I’ve hidden or was made to feel I should hide any of the ways I shine. Told everyone I’m fine, and believed that lie myself.” It feels like a dagger in my heart as I sit in wonder and regret, asking myself why I took so long to find the ways that I should have been shining my entire life.

We return to death on “Dry County” as the pronoun shifts from “I” to “she” to “we” to “you.” The “I” represents the personal response to grief. “She” represents the person who was “waving like she had to go, and so she left.” “We” shows the intimacy of memory as Smith reflects on the past that was shared. Finally, “you” represents him speaking to a mystery audience who appears to be nearing death themselves. There’s a peace to the way that he speaks of death, as though he knows the comfort and fear that comes with that extraordinary adventure, choosing to optimistically opt into comfort in the great disappearing.

Finally, on the closing track of the album, we hear him end the record by singing “Tie me up, untie me,” appearing to reference mewithoutYou’s track of the same name, where lyricist Aaron Weiss sings that exact phrase, followed by “all this wishing I was dead is getting old.” Smith follows his phrase differently, however, finishing with “tie me up again.” I can’t begin to interpret what he means in that final moment of the record, but to me, it feels like a refutation of “all this wishing I was dead” that Weiss presented, choosing to emphasize the hope and joy of living a life that’s wild, urgent, and desperate for individual expressions of love.

The Shapes We Make is the record I want to hear while driving home from the gig or sitting in the line of cars as they leave the festival I’ve been at all weekend. Importantly, for me, it’s a balm that delivers contemplation through the noise, reassurance in times of hardship and grief, and peace in a time of wars: old and new, literal and figurative. 

It feels like an exhale. A restoration. An invitation.

“So, if you are alive, raise your hands. Keep them open. Reach out for anyone.”

Noëlle Midnight (e/er) is a transgender podcaster, poet, musician, and photographer in Seattle, WA. E can be found online with er podcast Idle Curiosities, tweets on Bluesky at @noellemidnight.com, photos on the Instagram alternative Glass at @noellemidnight, and movie reviews of varying quality on Letterboxd at @noellemidnight.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Phantom Island | Album Review

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p(doom) records

Well, well, well. Once again, we find ourselves back in the Gizzverse. It wasn’t even a year ago that I was here telling you all about how death, taxes, and King Gizzard are life’s only certainties. And what did they go and do? They proved me right.

The Aussie psych-rock experimenters’ 27th(!!) album, Phantom Island, started with extras from the Flight b741 sessions. These songs were born out of the same hyper-collaborative energy as b741, but the band felt like they needed something else to be complete. After linking with the LA Philharmonic during their 2023 marathon show at the Hollywood Bowl, the Gizzards realized that live orchestrals were exactly what they needed to complete the circle. They connected with Chad Kelly, who created arrangements to accompany the meandering jams and stitched-together hooks locked in the Gizz vault. 

Phantom Island reimagines Gizzard’s home-grown rock-centric sound, filtering it through the lens of an opera house symphony orchestra. The symphonics are overdubbed atop the messy, chaotic jams, creating a mix of meticulous arrangements and free-wheeling improv that feels quintessentially Gizzard. Stu Mackenzie used a Tascam 8-track to blend the two sounds, combining them into one rock orchestra mashup. Phantom Island propels the sky-high, airborne stories of b741 into outer space. Gizzard broke through the atmosphere, sending their sound and their stories to another dimension. The result is an album that feels animated and colorful, even with its more insular narratives. When I close my eyes and listen, this feels like the soundtrack of its own movie or musical, bouncing between styles without losing cohesion. Would I be surprised if they turned this into a stage show? Not even a little—why shouldn’t King Gizz have their own Gamehendge? They dropped a “making of” documentary on YouTube last week, a 13-minute look into bringing the orchestrations into their cosmic sprawl. On the other side of the glass wall, the Gizzards sit on a couch in their flight uniforms from the “Le Risque” music video, heads hanging back as they listen to their jam fragments intertwine with the lush strings or grooving horns.

I’ve always loved King Gizz for their instrumentation. The high school band nerd in me is partial to Mackenzie’s penchant for flute, but I also remember being entranced by their dueling drum sets the first time I saw them live (Brooklyn Steel 2018, I almost passed out because I got too high). Gizz has always had inklings of symphonics in them, but Phantom Island is spacious, giving them more room to go on rambling tangents, switch from biker rock to chamber orchestrals, and delve even deeper into a narrative throughline. The album takes the listener on a journey from outer space to the underworld, with tales of being lost at sea (“Aerodynamic”), flying in a spaceship (“Spacesick”), or speeding down an anonymous open road (“Eternal Return”). Each song chronicles a different adventure and sometimes a different adventurer—whether or not the characters across the record are the same person, they’re all on their own journeys within the same greater universe.

Phantom Island opens with the title track, a jazz-funk jam that provides us with our setting: a feverish dreamland where nothing is what it seems (“Is this mental confusion or have I finally found my purpose?” and “The palm tree’s looking at me funny with a sideways belligerence”). The song unravels into its own miniature rock opera (“Phantom Island / Insane asylum” is now what my brain plays while returning to factory settings), making it clear early that nothing on Phantom Island is what it seems. 

The strings take center stage by the time we get to “Lonely Cosmos,” arpeggiating through unsettling minor chords and mixing with flute before fading into a sole acoustic guitar. It’s the send-off into space and the subsequent realization of your prolonged solitude. Where b741’s existentialism was strategic and hidden, Phantom Island gets right down into it. The unnerving string theme returns after the line “Are we alone in this cosmic effigy?” bending into its own dark, tangential underworld before yanking itself out of it, propelling back into its punchy acoustic melody with the line “I’m inhaling stardust.” It’s so casually random that I can’t help but chuckle. It’s that constant back-and-forth that keeps you on your toes, even when the orchestrals are at their most overpowering.

“Eternal Return” and “Panpsych” are the most b741 of the bunch, leaning psychedelic rock while still using the orchestrals as a central counterpoint. “Eternal Return” mixes spiky guitars and saxophone with sweeping strings and double-tracked vocals, creating a 360-degree sound that speaks to the song’s theme of being “on a round-trip perpetual.” “Panpsych” is equally as fuzzy and jam-centric, with flute tying the main theme together through cryptic lyrics (“The wind whispers secret message for those who’ve grown ears to hear it”).

Gizz holds the theme of “Lonely Cosmos” close through all of Phantom Island’s wandering journeys. Subsequent tracks place their characters in isolation, stranded or lost or eons away from anything familiar. “Spacesick” follows a nauseated astronaut on his first trip to space, already fantasizing about being back at home. “Aerodynamic” finds a lone sailor contemplating his last moments at sea. “Sea of Doubt” combines twangy country rock with pensive introspection, toying with anxiety, uncertainty, and the need for friends to help bring you back to yourself. Its opening is so bright and eager that the first lines, literally being “I’m on the edge of a cliff,” have delayed impact. The airy delivery, combined with the crisp guitar tones and trilling woodwinds, conflicts with the tension in the lyrics, namely in the lines about anxiety landslides, mind forests, and treading water. Two-thirds of the way through, the strings pull away, leaving just acoustic and vocals. A sweet falsetto, a harmonizing flute, a sigh of relief. “Here comes the sun to clear the fog / Here comes a friend for me to lean on”—bordering on corny, but its simplicity and gentle sincerity tugs at the heartstrings, an unexpected softness from the same guys who conjured sludge, fire, and thrash metal on PetroDragonic Apocolypse just two years ago.

By my twentieth trip around Phantom Island, it became clear that the whole journey could very well just be in my head, and that is precisely the point. The album drifts between structure and instinct, between story and sound. You can follow the narrative if you want, or simply let the whole thing wash over you. It will consume you regardless. The deeper you go, the harder it is to tell whether you’re hearing a rock record dressed up in strings or a symphony unraveling into a jam. Either way, we can take comfort in the fact that the Gizzverse keeps expanding. 

Cassidy is a culture writer and researcher currently based in Brooklyn. She loves many things, including, but not limited to, rabbit holes, Caroline Polachek, blueberry pancakes, her cat Seamus, and adding to her record collection. She is on Twitter @cassidynicolee_, and you can check out more of her writing on Substack.

Keep – Almost Static | Album Review

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Honeysuckle Sound

Recently, I’ve made a resolution to get out of my apartment and go see more movies. It's been a drought so far this year, with my second-to-last entry being A Minecraft Movie, during which an eight-year-old screamed “CHICKEN JOCKEY” directly into my left ear. Beyond that, last week’s viewing of The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow left much to be desired in terms of storytelling, character development, and overall positivity in a moviegoing experience. The only bright spot has been watching the latest season of Black Mirror with my roommate, which certainly isn’t providing the “magic” that Nicole Kidman touts at AMC. These episodes, which may as well be movies with how long some of them are, feel beyond dystopian, more akin to a pale imitation of reality, which is even more terrifying. 

This dread has begun to infiltrate my listening habits; whenever I end up breaking out my speakers, I've been bumping a lot of heavier, more anguish-filled music across all genres. That new Deafheaven record may be quite charming in its execution, but certainly not in its subject matter. This must've been part of the reason why I felt a gravitation towards Keep when I heard their newest record, Almost Static, was coming out soon, why I didn’t hesitate to give it a listen, and more importantly, how I remembered the band’s ease towards cultivating a dark atmospheric texture from the moment you press play.

Photo by Frankie Ruggiero

The Virginia-based group has become a vital player in this current wave of heavier, distorted guitar-centric music, commonly falling under the now all-encompassing moniker of shoegaze. Their sound feels quite adjacent to contemporaries such as Gleemer, Downward, and the now shoegaze-synonymous heavyweight julie, along with some of the more crushing grunge aspects that have evolved in the wake of this renaissance, akin to work from bands like Soul Blind, Bleed, and a new favorite of mine, Present. My history with Keep dates back to 2023, when they released their full-length record, Happy In Here. Tracks such as “Dasani Daydream” and “Start to Wonder” immediately stood out to me through their simultaneous senses of excitement and dread, thanks to the ghastly guitar tones and textures, but also due to the spine-tingling album cover depicting a spiky lime-green toothbrush in the interior of someone’s mouth from the perspective of a uvula. Maybe that’s what people with the cilantro gene feel whenever they put the coriander plant in their mouth. Regardless, I never have a great time looking at the record’s cover, and maybe that’s the point. In comparison, the miniatures that make up the cover of Almost Static feel like they came straight out of the opening scene of Inland Empire, thanks to the cataclysmic destruction depicted by the miniature plastic and metallic structures.

To get this out of the way, calling Almost Static strictly a shoegaze album would be doing the record a disservice. Most, if not all, of the songs on this album can be attributed to certain strains of alternative rock, but they don't feel particularly indebted to genre heavyweights like my bloody valentine or Slowdive. That’s not to say you won’t get those beautiful yet dismal walls of sound. In fact, you get them right off the bat with opener “Fun Facts,” a track with lyrics bringing together some of the darker aspects of the quartet’s songwriting style, sitting in between hazy guitars and otherworldly keyboards. The following “Smile Down (Into Nothing)” amplifies the unease even further, with almost unintelligible vocals serving as the chorus. For the Glare heads reading this right now, this is the exact song I will point you to, as the guitar tones feel quite reminiscent of their work on Sunset Funeral.

Part of the decision to sideline the vocals is due to the nature of shoegaze music as a genre, but for Keep in particular, there’s the added responsibility of drums for vocalist Nick Yetka. There's a unique opportunity to let your vocals blend into the swirl of noise while you focus on the drums. Plus, that frees up all the other instruments to take on that added creative expression. You can hear the effects of this freedom in all the sonic elements at play in the album’s second single and closer, “Hurt a Fly,” which sees the band run across the finish line with washed-out vocals melding perfectly with heavier guitars once again. You can almost see the band members looking at their pedalboards while you listen to this song, as well as Yetka zeroing in on his drums while letting his voice run wild. 

There’s also a sense of Keep’s signature sorrow coming from the track “New Jewelry,” with drummer and vocalist Nick Yetka screaming, “Cause if you see me, you should let me go” in the chorus, like the protagonist who realizes they have become more of the villain than the hero. Think something like [spoilers] Leonardo DiCaprio during the final act of Shutter Island. How do you take apart everything you think you know and reconstruct it in a clean and sensible manner? Can you tell I just watched Shutter Island a few days ago? For the first time, too! 

Some of the more exciting moments on the record are when the band ventures out of the traditional confines of the shoegaze moniker. The track “Sodawater” kicks off with a sonic departure from the gloomy aspects that envelop the majority of the first side of the record. The guitars feel more whimsical than despondent, evoking the jangle-pop tones of groups like Wishy or Alvvays. The simple yet anthemic chorus of “I’m all right / I don’t mind” brings a rare feeling of relaxation to the record, making the song a personal highlight. “Bermuda” features eerie guitars that, to my ears, feel more indebted to the work of post-rock outfit HEALTH rather than a shoegaze band. Meanwhile, the vocals are light, reminiscent of something from a mid-2010s Turnover track. It's a fascinating mix of inspirations and sounds that make for one of the more unique tracks on this record. 

The title track, “Almost Static,” feels like the darker, moodier, and more decipherable sibling of Nothing’s “Blue Line Baby.” Most of the song features a toned-down guitar passage with simpler drums, allowing for more clarity in Yetka’s voice. Even with things dialed back, the production choices make these instruments sound like they could fill up a warehouse, at least until they all come crashing down in the final leg of the track. The same could be said for “No Pulse,” which amps up the depth of the guitars with a groovy riff and drum pattern. 

As the album nears its end and the final chords ring out from “Hurt A Fly,” there’s a sense of a journey completed, like the protagonist has reached where they’ve been trying to get all this time. The cinematic aspects of Almost Static stand out from a growing alternative rock landscape as a project that's greater than the sum of its parts. The band’s decisiveness towards cultivating that overall journey from the darkest parts to the light is a brilliant reminder of the power of a complete project and the care that goes into it. Don’t let that shoegaze moniker on the album fool you: Keep is beyond that simple classification.

Samuel Leon (they/he) is a Brooklyn-based performance photographer, playwright, and semi-retired performer. Sam writes plays about music but not musicals. Sam doesn’t like using the internet, but they will if they have to. If you are even remotely close to Brooklyn and want Sam to make you look cool on camera, hit them up on @sleonpics.

Home Is Where – Hunting Season | Album Review

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Wax Bodega

Until recently, Home Is Where’s bio across streaming services read simply, “our band could be yr neighborhood.” It was a fun play on a classic Minutemen line that gave an entire book on indie rock its title, but together with the band’s name, it always resonated more as a mission statement. This is hardly a surprise: both myself and all four members of the group are from Florida, and I cannot think of a rock band that has rendered the Southeastern United States with such pinpoint accuracy. Whenever I’m listening to the whaler, I can practically feel the August humidity pasting my shirt to my back while I mow my mother’s lawn at 9 am. The line “Grass scabs over cracks in your driveway” from “Sewn Together from the Membrane of the Great Sea Cucumber” could have been written while staring at my old carport torn up by tree roots. 

That detail is just one example of lead singer and songwriter Bea MacDonald’s keen eye for the grotesque sutures holding 21st-century southern life together. Animal carcasses, the living dead, and brutally functional man-made structures dominate the imagery of the band’s first two records; part body horror and part post-apocalypse in their depictions of her home state. She’s acutely aware of the sins and contradictions foundational to certain subsets of the cultural landscape of America, but there’s an effort to understand in MacDonald’s writing that many would-be critics stop short of. Even as a trans woman alienated from her home by its government, there’s a warmth at war with the ugliness on display in her songs. That conflict is the beating heart of Hunting Season, guiding Home Is Where through their most winding, sensitive, and tangibly southern set of songs yet. Well, that and 13 different Elvis Presley impersonators’ lives flashing before their eyes as they die in the same massive car wreck. 

If you’re confused on that last bit, don’t worry: Home Is Where have never been ones to let an outlandish concept interfere with their visceral emotional punch. “artificial grass” is the only track to name-drop the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll outright, but the focus is still on the pretender to the throne’s identity crisis and his dying revelation that “every king is a thief.” It’s also the only moment on the record where MacDonald’s scream is front and center, relying more than ever on her natural drawl to wring the emotion from these songs. For the majority of the record, guitarist Tilley Komorny trades emo tapping and fiery post-hardcore riffs for delicate pedal steel and fleet-fingered acoustic strumming. Even the electric tracks like lead single “migration patterns” have more in common with The Band or alt-country darlings Wednesday than they do with the band’s emo peers. This is by no means a betrayal of their scene: if anything, Hunting Season is the most themselves Home Is Where have ever been. 

Photo by Texas Smith

The album offsets all these new sounds with a slew of recurring motifs from throughout the band’s catalog. Opening track “reptile house” echoes the whaler in both its folk-heavy sound and gruesome imagery, with fatal car crashes and suburban decay standing in sharp relief to the natural order. MacDonald literally self-immolates in a haunting refrain before once again bemoaning Western civilization’s unwillingness to let things die. “The end of the world is taking forever” from “daytona 500” has been simplified to the passive, “Oh! The end goes on and on and on,” as the band plays her out. It’s not the cheeriest start, but MacDonald spends the record’s thirteen songs scanning the most hostile backroads and small towns for signs of happiness, however hard their surroundings try to snuff that joy out. 

Throughout Hunting Season, MacDonald identifies with drifters wandering through scenes of an American dream melted like plastic in the sun. “milk & diesel” features a philosophical exchange on memory and meaninglessness between two of history’s most infamous traitors, Pat Garrett and Judas himself, while “mechanical bull” sees MacDonald share her own take on meeting the devil at a crossroads. Tales of cowboys and outlaws have long brought comfort or at least a sense of self to those in exile, and that holds true even a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Many across the country, including MacDonald and Komorny, have been forced to either live a lie or leave the states where they were born and raised thanks to increasingly aggressive anti-trans legislation. When the former sings, “No matter where you go, you’re still on the run” on “the wolf man,” it’s enough to make someone whose own migration was more intentional feel a sting of homesickness. 

Only someone who truly loves Florida could describe the state in all its strange glory. Everything from discarded McDonald’s bags, fire & brimstone billboards, and a gorilla advertising a Harley Davidson sale litter the medians of the album’s highway. It seems absurd or alien on paper, but each one of these sights reminds me of the biannual 8-hour drives down I-75 my family would make to Tampa for holidays. MacDonald describes these scenes with the same detached mix of wonder and bewilderment as a ten-year-old child viewing them from a backseat window, but also the fondness of an adult who’s lived around them, left, and come back. “stand-up special” captures these bittersweet memories like mosquitoes in sap, with Bea’s voice backed up by Shannon Taylor of awakebutstillinbed as they get stuck within their own warped scenes of Americana. The band glides through the song’s folksy bounce, halting only to devastate at the end with the revelation, “I’ve been exploding my whole life!” 

If anything keeps the record’s spirits high, though, it’s Home Is Where’s unified efforts as a band to make the most impassioned and close-to-home music of their lives. Both “stand-up special” and its sister track right before, “black metal mormon,” are such breezes to listen to that it’s hard for my face not to break into a soft smile while listening. The embrace of songs structured around a strong chorus leads to some of the sweetest melodies the band has offered yet. “shenandoah” is a gorgeous torch song and the most direct nod yet to the band’s longtime muse Bob Dylan, harmonica and all. Even a song as layered in its heartbreak as “milk & diesel” gives Komorny the space to rip a solo worthy of Neil Young himself. The most furious jam comes on “roll tide,” a steady, slow burn more than half the length of the band’s first album. It begins slow and sparse, gradually building into a wall of dissonant guitars, rolling drums, and wordless shouts before unraveling into vocal samples by the very end. 

The track was also the most impenetrable on the record to me. Not due to its length or a lack of hooks - the humming of the titular phrase was one of the first things from the record to get properly lodged in my brain - but maybe because of just how much I’ve heard those words. I spent my middle and high school years in Alabama, and I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times I heard “roll tide!” spoken, spat out, or screamed by devout college football fans during that time. It was meant as a rallying cry, but I could only register it as an ominous sign of domination. That perspective made this penultimate track read more as a dirge, and to be quite honest, for as good as the song is, it bummed me out. It wasn’t until several listens in that the verses began to reshape it for me.

I saw how the wind blew through
The trees and the leaves and the fruit
Were not moved

Well, it dawns on me, it’s late enough
To call it morning; all we need
Is the light

These images paint a picture of perseverance and, if you dare, hope. In southern vernacular, ‘roll tide’ has outgrown its place as a sports team’s trademarked battle cry: it’s used to mean everything from “have a good day” to “keep carrying on.” So much so that during a recent visit with family, my partner, who grew up on the West Coast, was completely lost hearing it for the first time. I’m choosing to believe MacDonald has appropriated it further as a call of queer resilience in the places where it’s needed most and people understand it the least. If nothing else, this band got me to join in a chant of “roll tide” for the first time in my life, and that’s a miracle in and of itself. 

For all the death, destruction, and bitter memories within, Hunting Season is not a record that wallows in defeat. Home Is Where identify resistance and community as the only ways forward, so we may as well all be from the same neighborhood. They kicked us out of the old one. To quote the coda that the band finally etched into wax in the final moments of the record: “Home Is Where forever.”

Wes Cochran is a Portland-based writer, worker, and listener. You can find them @wacochran on Instagram, via their email electricalmess@gmail.com, or navelgazing their way up and down South Portland.