Wave Goodbye and Watch It Go: The Hotelier’s Home, Like Noplace is There at 10

A decade later and the critical darling of the emo-revival is just as relevant, and its message is more desperate than ever.

By Bryn Gelbart  |  February 25, 2024 | 10:00am
Music Features The Hotelier
Wave Goodbye and Watch It Go: The Hotelier’s Home, Like Noplace is There at 10
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I first discovered The Hotelier in college. I was in my first New York City apartment scouring Reddit for new music. It was 2015 so naturally r/emo would not shut up about Home, Like Noplace is There. As I found out later that night, the band’s sophomore album was a towering achievement. Fast-forward a year and I was standing in a modest sized crowd at Bowery Ballroom with plenty of room to breathe—waving my arms and wondering where all those people were. Where were the prophets of The Hotelier, who had been posting about the fourth-coming of emo just months ago?

Certainly not here, I thought, as the band who made the defining record of emo’s fourth wave began their set to minimal fanfare. There was no pushing or screaming along, just a scant hour of a band playing their songs. That was very much the vibe both times I saw the Hotelier in New York City, even at the band’s height of popularity—and even with reviews from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and theneedledrop. It was an odd reception to what music critics and deeply online fans recognized as one of the standouts in its genre. Ten years later, the legacy of Home, Like Noplace is There has cemented it as one of the greats.

Home, Like Noplace is There was released on February 25th, 2014—during what I retrospectively consider the second half of the emo revival (or fourth wave). It was a distinctly different era from the visceral return to ‘80s and ‘90s roots represented by Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing, bands that were inactive already by 2014. The Hotelier (or Hotel Year, as they were originally known) had always been a DIY indie rock band, but sounding like an old emo band was never the intention. When Home, Like Noplace is There was shiny and new, it felt like the wave could keep cresting for the rest of time. The suburban house is a rite of passage for emo album covers, but Home is a classic in a long line of them, stretching back all the way to the American Football house and Braid’s The Age of Octeen. The story goes that the plan was to spray paint the house for real, until the homeowner backed out at the last minute. The Hotelier settled for Photoshop and most people online wouldn’t know the difference. If you own the record like I do, take a close look and you can find the obvious computer-generated job in the word “noplace.”

The album begins with a declaration of purpose. “Open the curtains,” lyricist Christian Holden proclaims at the head of the grandiose “An Introduction to the Album.” You’re either in for this type of earnestness, or you’re not. How you feel about the first 30 seconds of this album will likely reflect how you feel about the rest of it. I was in love the first time I heard it—finding assurance in Holden’s lyrics, which were raw yet poetic. The music reflected these feelings; calmness and anger overflowing out of it. “Introduction” builds to a cathartic exclamation of profanity followed by a pleading: “The pill that you gave didn’t do anything. I just slept for years on end. Fuck!” It is a feeling each of the eight other tracks replicate and tap into in their own ways, each an important piece of the emotional, political humanity Home, Like Noplace is There is about.

The centerpiece of the record is “Your Deep Rest.” The title is a bit of a joke (say it fast now), but the content is anything but. It’s a daring single, an emo-pop anthem about a friend’s suicide and not being able to stomach the funeral. It strikes at everything the record is about—guilt, death, depression, loss, hating our awkward bodies—and does it in under four minutes. And it’s not even based on a true story. But it doesn’t have to be.

For a band that mostly wrote from experience, the song was the Hotelier’s first experiment mixing storytelling with lived experience—a writing technique that would define their 2016 record, Goodness. It might be the reason why it’s the band’s most popular song. Or, maybe it’s the infectious opening riff that carries through the verses. No, I think it’s the imagery—so strong as to be real, the images of a loved one’s corpse as a shell conjure up feelings and memories in their specificity and their vagueness. This is a cornerstone of great pop-punk and emo writing, just look to the Wonder Years. In the hands of a talented songwriter in this space, specificity is relatability.

Images of cut wounds and jutting bone make an appearance during the chilling outro of “In Framing.” It’s a theme that goes back to the band’s first record, It Never Goes Out, where my favorite Hotelier song resides. In that track, “An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club,” Holden relives teenage wanderlust before bringing us down to Earth. It may just be pure storytelling, those may not have been any real person’s damaged wrists, no one single last night of childhood, but why does it matter if we lived it or it’s in our heads? The damage is still real. “You lifted the towel, the wrist showed the bone,” Holden sings on “In Framing.” In three minutes, the passive act of watching a loved one suffer turns into active guilt and self-hate for letting it happen. There is an intersection of guilt and hopelessness on the Hotelier’s first two albums that echoed how my own depression felt at the time.

“Life in Drag” is the heaviest the record gets, a banger about gender politics. “You wore binary like a badge of fucking honor, while I struggled dealing with the loss of yet another life in drag,” Holden sings. The political is personal in a way that is inextricable for them and the people they are writing these songs about, both real and imagined. In 2024, this song is depressingly ageless, as the violence against trans people in this country feels like it’s at a fever pitch. Anti-Trans bills are being drafted up, citing the damn New York Times as ammo for their bigoted attack on my friend’s bodies. The rot runs so deep.

There were excellent releases from trans artists like Home Is Where and Teenage Halloween in this space in 2023 that weren’t afraid to tackle gender politics, but none of it feels as academic as the Hotelier’s perspective. “Projected map of the body: it’s crass, abject, colonial” is a line screamed on “Among the Wildflowers”; this is the dense imagery I find myself appreciating more and more as I return to the albums over the years.

If there are any awkward choices on the record, it’s “Housebroken,” a song the band effectively disowned for years. The mid-tempo track chugs along, weaving a yarn about domestic abuse as an allegory for police brutality. It is potent, even when it goes over your head. But the misinterpretation of one line in particular (“We must keep our bitches in line”) led the band to stop playing it at shows entirely. Holden said in a Reddit AMA that “‘Housebroken’ is a poorly written song that hurt fans I cared about. So I regret that.” Trying to build something and failing others along the way is a recurring demon for the Hotelier. Stated forthright in the album’s first track, “I had a chance to build something beautiful and I choked,” and recapitulated in the finale.

“Dendron” doubles down on the pain we feel when we let the people we love down. At the end of the stunning final track, the former anarchist sings “Cut off my arm at the bone in solidarity. Capital teaches that there’s less when you share.” These final minutes of Home, Like Noplace is There still give me chills after hundreds of listens, but that line stands out the more distance I have from the record’s release. . To me, this is the thesis of the record: It’s not just a condemnation of how capitalism pits individuals against one another, it’s what all our shared loss and grief means in the face of a machine that eats hopes and dreams. It’s something I find myself going to the record for now that I didn’t used to. It’s no longer an excuse to wallow in my own negative feelings, it’s a reminder that so little has actually changed in the past 10 years. But it makes me question how much I’ve changed, too.

The release of Home, Like Noplace is There was, in retrospect, a peak for the fourth wave of emo, which would crest circa 2017. During these few years, the genre saw the most mainstream exposure and critical respect the genre had since the mid 2000s. Between 2014 and 2016 bands including Joyce Manor, Pup, and Touché Amoré released albums to stellar reviews and larger acclaim outside the sphere of usual weirdos. For me, it was an era of desperately needed validation. What my 21-year-old cohorts called “emo” was treated as an ironic dose of nostalgia. The pressure to diversify the genres I listen to in college was ultimately a good thing, but it was done in bad faith. I didn’t need to grow up from emo or pop-punk. I no longer need Home, Like Noplace is There or Goodness to validate my taste in music, as I once thought I did.

I used to wonder if I was sad because I listened to emo or if I listened to emo because I was sad. Approaching 30 years old, you’d hope I don’t think about it this way anymore. I don’t. I realize how many of the best parts of me were born out of this music—my empathy, my conscience, my deep political unrest, my belief in music as a force for change. In 2024, Home, Like Noplace is There reminds me how deeply connected my own mental health struggles are to the material systems that undergird our society. The final line is a dare to anyone who disagrees: “Tell me again that it’s all in my head.”

 
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