Home Is Where embrace country music on new album ‘Hunting Season,’ share new song

Home Is Where confirmed a few months ago that the followup to 2023’s excellent The Whaler is coming in 2025, and today they’ve announced it. It’s called Hunting Season, and it comes out on May 23 via Wax Bodega. It finds them once again working with producer Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Jeff Rosenstock, Joyce Manor, etc), and it features backing vocals throughout the album by awakebutstillinbed‘s Shannon Taylor, pedal steel/dobro by Dan Potthast (Jeff Rosenstock’s band, MU330, etc), and piano by Evan Bailey. As you may know if you’ve seen Home Is Where preview some of the new material live at recent shows, country music was a big influence on Hunting Season.

“I was homesick and Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers’ first record specifically sounded like home,” says singer Bea 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.”

The album’s 13 songs are also said to each by sung from the perspective of a different Elvis impersonator, and a press release notes that Bea and guitarist Tilley Komorny wrote most of the album remotely after fleeing their Florida homes “due to the state’s growing hostility towards trans people.” Recording it, however, only took three days. “It’s the hardest we’ve ever jammed on a record,” Tilley says.

The first single is “Migration Patterns,” which is definitely full of country/Americana signifiers–Dylanesque harmonica, pedal steel, and a rollicking country-punk crunch–and it’s all delivered in a uniquely Home Is Where fashion. Check it out below.

Home Is Where have one upcoming show at the moment: day one of Ekko Astal and the Gender Liberation Movement’s Liberation Weekend in DC (May 30 & 31) with Pinkshift, Combat, Pretty Bitter, and “2 special secrets artists.” More on that here.

Tracklist
1. reptile house
2. migration patterns
3. artificial grass
4. black metal mormon
5. stand-up special
6. bike week
7. everyone won the lotto
8. shenandoah
9. milk & diesel
10. mechanical bull
11. the wolf man
12. roll tide
13. drive-by mooning