Home Is Where will release their recently shared “milk & diesel”, the band’s second single ahead of their forthcoming album Hunting Season available May 23rd via Wax Bodega.

“This song was inspired by my grandparents both getting diagnosed with dementia at the same time. It’s about how helpless you feel watching someone you love deteriorate,” says MacDonald of the song. The accompanying lighthearted video, directed by Texas Smith (they/he), counterbalances the song’s subject matter through a dreamlike world in black & white. Inspired by creature features and Béla Tarr’s Sátántango alike, the video sees the hunter protagonist of the band’s “migration patterns” video entering a southern diner, where she and its clientele of Elvis impersonators and spooky monsters close up shop and jam to the track.

In the lead up to the writing and recording of the album, the band spent a lot of time on the road—both together and apart–on tours and cross-country moves (MacDonald and guitarist Tilley Komorny fled their Florida homes due to the state’s growing hostility towards trans people. Folk icons like Neil Young, Alan Jackson, and Gram Parsons were on heavy rotation in their tour van, as was Dylan, whose famous description of Blonde on Blonde as “Thin Wild Mercury Music” inspired MacDonald in defining the new album’s sound.

The group came up with the album’s concept while listening to The Flying Burrito Brothers in the desert. Returning to work with the whaler producer Jack Shirley (Jeff Rosenstock, Joyce Manor, Deafheaven), and with instrumental contributions from auxiliary members from Death Rosenstock and awakebutstillinbed, Home Is Where recorded Hunting Season in just three days. “It’s the hardest we’ve ever jammed on a record,” Kormony notes. She and MacDonald co-wrote most of the album over Zoom while living on opposite sides of the country in early 2023. During this time, MacDonald was, by her admission, a bit of a shut-in, going months on end without leaving her house. Writing songs for the open road offered her a momentary escape.

“I was homesick and Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers’ first record specifically sounded like home,” explains MacDonald. “When we traveled as a band, the music that opened us up the most was country music like Parsons or Hank Williams. Listening to The Gilded Palace of Sin during the winter of ‘21 opened a new tour tradition: when the weather is nice, the sun is shining, hopes are high, I put on that record and without fail every time something memorable happens.”

Pre-order Hunting Season HERE