When it comes to translating the room-hopping lifestyle through song, many artists have offered a dreary and desolate outlook—dating all the way back to Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” which likely drew inspiration from a news report involving the tragic death of a petty criminal. Beyond the bitter isolation of Leonard Cohen's “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” artists ranging from Chris Isaak to Ella Fitzgerald have cast hotels as personal sanctuaries—a place to run from your problems, or to further close yourself off in the face of loneliness and malaise. While the Jackson 5 and Slade have songs in their repertoire casting hotels as dangerous hellmouths of sin, Joni Mitchell's “Blue Motel Room” (what is a motel room if not a sad version of a hotel room?) finds a contemplative melancholy in the titular hovel's cerulean walls, asking, “Will you still love me/When I get back to town?”

In more recent times, as the idea of rock star hotel mayhem has further hardened into a cliché, artists have taken the songwriting concept of hotel-as-metaphor to places simultaneously surreal and hilariously mundane. Last year, Jarvis Cocker teamed up with pianist Chilly Gonzales for the conceptual Room 29, a decadence-demythologizing project envisioning the perspective of a piano situated in the Chateau Marmont and featuring the indelible open-ended query, “Is there anything sadder than a hotel room that hasn’t been fucked in?” On Bon Iver's heady 2016 LP 22, A Million, Justin Vernon reached towards spirituality on “33 ‘GOD’” by “staying at the Ace Hotel,” a thunderous and celestial crescendo accompanying the boutique-hotel namecheck.

And then there’s Father John Misty's latest self-excoriative effort, God's Favorite Customer, which presents the hotel room as a place of no escape. The record was partially the result of FJM mastermind Josh Tillman's two-month stay at NYC's lavish Lafayette House, a five-room brownstone with marble fireplaces and rates scraping $500 a night. But Tillman casts the lap of luxury as its own moneyed prison, and the record’s first single, “Mr. Tillman,” reflects the dizzying after-effects of such isolation.

The accompanying video, with Misty doppelgängers and a guestbook-flipping “you can’t check in if you never left” vibe, only adds to the song's eerie sense of slow despair. The bad dream of a clip is not unlike a stay at the Great Northern Hotel from “Twin Peaks”—if said stay ended when the guest leapt from the roof onto the top of a taxi. On another recent Misty track, “The Palace,” bags of speed and a steady diet of room service are but a veneer for the type of malaise that causes him to openly muse on taking in a pet turtle. “I’m ready to come home,” he says near the song’s end, before eliding into an unresolved falsetto, “I'm in over my head.”

If God's Favorite Customer uses real-life lavishness as its setting, Arctic Monkeys’ admirably bizarre new LP, Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, dreams up an empty elegance represented by its titular lunar luxury-spot stop. Spanning soft-focus psych-pop and French lounge music, the album practically sounds like a dark corner of an empty hallway, nothing but vacant rooms lining all sides. Embracing a surreality that was only hinted at in the band’s previous work, frontman Alex Turner waxes lyrical on imaginary lounge residencies and day-spa appointments made by Jesus Christ himself, non-sequitur marginalia that nonetheless conjures a strong image of dystopian hospitality.

On the album’s centerpiece, “Four Out of Five,” Turner pitches the listener on a moonbase taqueria called Information Action Ratio. But there’s no toasted tortillas to be found in the song's video, just Turner and a cavalcade of assistants, sprucing up the imagined hotel the album centers around while crafting ads to sell “virtual lifestyle packages.” It's a strange full-circle moment—instead of trashing the hotel rooms, here’s a rock star making sure the pillows are fluffed and the grounds are well-tended-to.

The clip for “Four Out of Five” was influenced by the work of Stanley Kubrick, but it’s a far cry from Joe Walsh's goofball, ax-wielding spin on The Shining. Instead, the trapped tunnel of on-the-road living that Turner and Misty conjure recalls the infamous utterings of that film's uncanny, undead twin girls: Come play with us, forever and ever and ever… we'll just need to hold a credit card at the desk, for incidentals and damages. Enjoy your stay.