I’ve always hated the concept of ‘desert island discs‘. So I’ve been shipwrecked on an island, marooned away from society, all amenities and all forms of human contact for potentially the rest of my sad and increasingly deranged life? I’ve not even got a beach ball to draw a face on and inevitably end up fucking by around week four as the loneliness drives me to sad, feral desperation? And you want me to choose eight songs to play on repeat for infinity to soundtrack my own mental journey into the heart of darkness?? I mean, I love Old Town Road as much as the next man, but by the hundred and twenty seventh time it’s played in the background as another angry parrot pecks at my arse hairs, repeatedly?? “Squawk! Can’t nobody tell me nothing! Squawk!”?? I’m going to learn to hate that song rather quickly.
But then I learned that perhaps it was just the number of songs that was the issue. Forty two songs to a desert island? Yeah, I reckon I could live quite happily for the rest of time. I’d still go crazy, obviously, but in a more earnestly satisfying and poignantly depressed sort of way. And those parrots will learn some bars.
Forty two songs. Two hours and twenty seven minutes. That is (as far as I can work out) the extent of Massachusetts group The Hotelier/The Hotel Year’s entire recorded output. And every emotional, artistic, intellectual and affectionate need a human being ever needs is here. Lead singer/songwriter/bassist Christian Holden is as accomplished a lyricist as there’s ever existed in the artform, possessing a poetic sensibility and unashamed earnestness that can fundamentally cleanse and then rearrange your very soul in a world of post-truth nihilism. More importantly though: their songs are almost always absolute fucking bangers. If you couldn’t speak English, The Hotelier would still be in your top ten favourite ever acts simply based on the sheer, bollock-splitting, rush of blood to the spleen of their immediate songcraft. Then you’d learn English from the lyrics, realise what beauty and genius underpins these bops, and would scientifically become a better person based on their teachings. You’d also learn words like ‘dichotomies’, ‘salutations’ and ‘chrysolite’ a lot earlier than most English speakers.
They are one of my favourite artists of all time. And the fuckers haven’t released a single piece of music since I first became aware of them
I can’t even remember how I first became aware of The Hotelier, can’t remember the first time I heard them, can’t remember the first time I felt their presence. It’s like asking me the first time I tied my shoelaces or became aware of my own mortality. I know there was a time where it wasn’t there, and now if most definitely is, but the changing of the guard was never noted. I heard their masterful third album ‘Goodness’ in late 2016, fell in love, named it the fourth best album of that year, fell in love even more and later retconned it to be the best album of that year (potentially the decade/century), saw them live and bawled my eyes out believing there was a God, and went back to assess their first two albums. In 2023, I named Soft Animal as the greatest song of the previous 10 years (spoiler…?). Goodness was released on May 27th 2016. I first started to become obsessed with them a few months after that. In the almost eight years since the fuckers haven’t released anything else!!
So perhaps I’m writing this list to tempt fate, to harness the dark power of Sod’s Law. Wouldn’t it be awful if I spent all this time and more than 10’000 words writing about the band’s complete discography only for them to release a new album and make the whole thing redundant?? Oh no, you guys, that’d be terrible! Absolutely don’t do that! That’d be the worst! Spank me, Daddoes, I’ve been naughty!! In terms of writing about the importance, majesty and genius of the band, Zac Djamos wrote a perfect piece for Stereogum to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the band’s most widely regarded second album ‘Home, Like Noplace is There’, which I’m not sure is humanly possible to compete with. So instead I’m sticking to what I do best: borderline autistic listicles! I was also blessed enough to have my longtime yaoi fixation Seth Manchester to answer a few questions about their bone rattlingly good production on the band’s (at time of writing!) final album.
Seriously though, the band have promised not to record another album before the revolution, so that’s yet another reason for all you workers to unite and break free of your chains (and join your local Communist Party branch, obviously). This list is basically a quick cheat sheet to the band, and forty two reasons why you should be as obsessed with them as I am!
Necessary Evil 