Bea MacDonald wanted to write The Great American Song. Hunting Season, the third LP with her band Home Is Where, has 13 of these, each one detailing the dying thoughts of an Elvis impersonator consumed by fumes and flames in a car wreck. To be clear, these songs are not all sung from the perspective of the same dying Elvis impersonator, but from 13 different Elvis impersonators, all dying in a thirteen-car pileup. An unlucky number of imitation Elvises, each grasping at their final scraps of life as they all burn—stuck in separate cars, but together in wreckage and in death. What could be more American than that?

With two back-to-back, critically acclaimed full-lengths–2021’s I Became Birds and 2023’s the whaler–Home Is Where established themselves as one of the defining bands of emo’s fifth wave. These records showcased the band of MacDonald, her songwriting partner/guitarist Tilley Komorny, bassist Connor O’Brien, and drummer Josiah Gardella channeling their Florida punk forebears and MacDonald’s longtime songwriting idol, Bob Dylan, into dread-fueled, voice-tearing emo that shows American rot splayed across highways.

In the lead up to the writing and recording sessions for Hunting Season, the band spent a lot of time on the road—both together and apart–on cross-country moves (MacDonald and Komorny fled their Florida homes due to the state’s growing hostility towards trans people) and on tours with bands like Foxing, glass beach, and Greet Death. Folk icons like Neil Young, Alan Jackson, and Gram Parsons were on heavy rotation in their tour van, as was Dylan, whose famous description of Blonde on Blonde as “Thin Wild Mercury Music” inspired MacDonald in defining the new album’s sound. Tracks like “Shenandoah” and “Milk & Diesel” best demonstrate this sonic shift: untamed, malleable, and coming and going all at once.

The looseness of Hunting Season could also be credited to their newfound country influences; the group came up with the album’s concept while listening to The Flying Burrito Brothers in the desert. Returning to work with the whaler producer Jack Shirley (Jeff Rosenstock, Joyce Manor, Deafheaven), and with instrumental contributions from auxiliary members from Death Rosenstock and awakebutstillinbed, Home Is Where recorded Hunting Season in just three days. “It’s the hardest we’ve ever jammed on a record,” Kormony notes. She and MacDonald co-wrote most of Hunting Season over Zoom while living on opposite sides of the country in early 2023. During this time, MacDonald was, by her admission, a bit of a shut-in, going months on end without leaving her house. Writing songs for the open road offered her a momentary escape.

“I was homesick and Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers' first record specifically sounded like home,” explains MacDonald. “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.”

You could call Hunting Season Home Is Where’s most accessible album to date. It’s less abrasive than their previous two, and more rooted in hook-based song structures. But don’t let the catchy choruses and sweet slide guitar sounds fool you into thinking that Home Is Where have lost their bite. Their signature hallmarks of grotesque Americana remain ever-present, if a touch more romanticized. These are road songs after all, meant to keep lonely travelers company as they brave these Great American Highways. To a woozy Elvis impersonator taking his last breaths after colliding head on with 12 of his doubles, flashing ambulance lights look like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

MacDonald has called Hunting Season Home Is Where’s most hopeful record, which might sound odd given its grim narrative concept. But when your previous record’s thesis statements were along the lines of “every day feels like 9/11” and “the end of the world is taking forever,” there’s nowhere to go but up. Hunting Season’s moments of striking, hard-earned beauty haunt its highways like flowers growing through cracks in the pavement. In the right light, the sight of dead fireflies still illuminated or a giant inflatable gorilla losing air outside a Harley-Davidson dealership could make you cry. Fond memories of more carefree times flood the minds of car crash victims to ease the pain of their final moments—birthday parties and Superbowl Sundays and youthful backyard shenanigans. In his dying words, an Elvis impersonator wonders, “Were we dumb or were we sweet? / What’s the difference, really?” Another embraces his fate, declaring, “I’d never want to live forever / I’d still have to go to work.”

Hunting Season is, in MacDonald’s words, “Real Southern rock ‘n roll.” Hailing from the Florida swamplands, Home Is Where are no strangers to the worst of the havoc that this country continues to unleash onto its inhabitants. This album is their most stunning, warts-and-all encapsulation of their love-hate relationship with the American mess, often at its most concentrated south of the Mason-Dixon line. “I love you, but sometimes you’re the worst person I’ve ever met,” MacDonald sings on “Drive-By Mooning,” the record’s closer. “I love you, but sometimes I’m the worst person I’ve ever been.” The fires burn on, smoke rising above a towering pile of smashed cars, the faces of 13 Elvises reflected in broken review windows. American absurdity at its finest.

-grace robins-somerville