These New Puritans became an overnight cult phenomenon with their 2010 album Hidden, an album that paired Jack Barnett’s murmured mantras and medieval compositions with his brother George’s militant beats. Their albums since have taken that premise along wildly divergent paths, taking Talk Talk and Depeche Mode textures to their logical end point in Crooked Wing. The culminating album, led by the Caroline Polachek–assisted “A Season in Hell,” is by turns epic, quiet, gorgeous, and ungodly. Or, as George Barnett put it more simply in press materials, “Jack on a piano, me smashing the living daylights out of some drums.”
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Home Is Where: Hunting Season [Wax Bodega]
Home Is Where broke out making athletic, anthemic hardcore, and have only limbered up with time. Hunting Season, the emo-rock outfit’s third album and the follow-up to 2023’s The Whaler, is looser and shaggier than its predecessors, written in a period when frontwoman Bea MacDonald “was homesick and Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers’ first record specifically sounded like home.” Fear not: The songs still find their moments to thrash, resulting in an album that feels like embarking on a freewheeling road trip while your companion waves a machete out the window.
