Home Is Where - hunting season (2025)

Thirteen Elvis impersonators, thirteen flaming wrecks, each one receiving its own song on one glorious mess of a record. Hunting Season, the third LP by Florida-rooted, country-scarred emo outfit Home Is Where, plays like a concept album ghostwritten by George Saunders during a fever dream—tragic, absurd, and achingly human in equal measure.

If their previous records I Became Birds and the whaler were anxiety attacks on tape, Hunting Season is the dizzy high that comes after. It’s looser, more melodic, and unexpectedly twangy—country-leaning without going soft, like The Flying Burrito Brothers ran a head-on collision with a fifth wave emo band. There’s slide guitar, there’s accordion, there’s even something like tenderness. But don’t get too comfortable: the grotesque beauty of American life is the band’s main character, bruises and all.

Bandleader Bea MacDonald calls this one their most hopeful record yet. And sure, the songs are catchier and less noisy, but they still hit with the same emotional weight—if not more. These tracks are full of ambition, scorched, and weirdly comforting, like watching fireworks over a junkyard.

It’s a little Dylan, a little Gram Parsons, a little unhinged Florida punk, and all heart. Hunting Season offers a unique brand of rock-‘n’-roll for a generation drifting between tenderness and rage, both falling apart and hanging on.