"Soft Animal"

Contrary to the prevailing stereotype, it’s not melodrama or overstatement that serve as the life-source of the Hotelier’s style of music. It’s catharsis, a necessary communal release. Nothing inconsequential happens in a Hotelier song—casual conversations between friends become a matter of life and death, a picture frame is seen as a metaphorical noose, an elderly woman at a piano holds eternal secrets. Though the Hotelier's anarchic politics and devotional punk stridency are almost diametrically opposed to the principles guiding the carpe diem spirit of Japandroids or Beach Slang, they have a similar galvanizing effect on audiences. Their music audibly attempts to treat every waking moment as an opportunity for epiphany or devastation.

So when “Soft Animal” begins with an unusually chill pastoral—singer/bassist Christian Holden and a friend resting in a cabin, reading Mary Oliver in the glare of the morning light—it’s not long before the mere sight of a deer becomes a turning point. The Hotelier work at their slowest simmer as Holden meditates on the young doe, feeling an overwhelming sense of connection, like the two may as well be the last surviving creatures on earth. Holden screams his central line—“Make me feel alive/ Make me believe that I don’t have to die”—and it takes on a cruel irony, as he hears shots fired and the murmur of hunters in the distance. But given the reaction to the Hotelier's last record, 2014's Home, Like Noplace Is There, Holden knows this lyric is going to be shouted back at him, and that his band can honor the request.