Home Is Where’s 2023 album, the whaler, embraced a strain of folky emo that felt indebted to Foxing, the Hotelier, and Bob Dylan — not just in sound, but in its stark storytelling. “I was trying to think about where my head was at and where the world was at from my immediate perspective, like my gut reaction to certain things. It got to a pretty dark place… I don’t feel like there’s any catharsis,” frontperson Bea MacDonald told us, reflecting upon its heaviness. “The record literally doesn’t end — it just continues to loop until you decide it’s over. A reason why I have such a complicated relationship with this record is because, to me, it comes across [as] hopeless.” For their next album, hunting season, the band leaned harder on their country inspirations, writing most of the songs remotely after fleeing their homes in Florida “due to the state’s growing hostility toward trans people.”
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Over the weekend, Home Is Where played Ekko Astral and the Gender Liberation Movement’s Liberation Weekend in Washington, D.C. — an event created to amplify trans rights — where they debuted many of their new songs. Backstage, they filmed a song-by-song breakdown of their latest album for AP. Throughout its 13 tracks, Home Is Where construct anthems about surviving their jobs (“migration patterns”), team up with Shannon Taylor of awakebutstillinbed (“stand-up special”), and tap into Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West (“bike week”). Whatever song you latch onto, their message remains clear: hunting season is a celebration of identity, existence, and wide-ranging experimentalism while paying homage to the South.
See Home Is Where take us through the whole album below.