So, this is going to be the last Our Hollow, Our Home album, and it isn’t arriving in circumstances that are too amicable. Just a couple of months ago, every band member left except for vocalist / guitarist Tobias Young, the second time this exact situation has happened after another mass exodus in early 2023. Statements have since been issued citing a lack of respect and creative duty, and some very public bad blood being aired that makes the decision to put the band on ice seem like a rather sensible one. After all, you’re not going to find another whole band’s worth of musicians to take roles, not after the last lot of members have also apparently chimed in to the tune of expecting this to happen. Granted, it’d take some digging through the responses to the individual statements to corroborate that, but two consecutive walkouts like this are enough to imply a problematic common denominator.
If it were a bigger band going through this, the internet’s metalcore muckrakers and drama-mongers would be having a field day with it all. But it’s not a bigger band, is it? It’s just Our Hollow, Our Home, whose stasis has scuppered most advancement for years. It’s honestly a wonder they’ve lasted this long, in fact. The strong moments they’ve had have begun to lose their luster the further removed the early 2010s they’ve found themselves. That era and its particular ways are something that Our Hollow, Our Home have never grown out of, and that’s why they’ve never made the biggest of waves, inside the UK scene or out. These days, their best quality is being consummate and competent, which you shouldn’t need explaining is not even close to enough.
What’s even more unfortunate is how, because Hope & Hell was never planned as a final album, the chances of some big, wild blowout are practically nonexistent. There isn’t even an indication of strained inter-band relationships; everything is just so normal and ordinary. It’s, quite frankly, the least interesting outcome that could’ve arisen from this situation. Tag that to a band who, by default, also isn’t that interesting, and Hope & Hell comes and goes without a trace.
It’s all the usual stuff for Our Hollow, Our Home—they’re biting Bury Tomorrow’s formula hard, while also clinging onto the decade-old genre archetypes that wore out ages ago. The phrase “caught in the undertow” is uttered not even a minute into opener Castaway, like an attempt to lay down as plainly as possible how this is a no-new-ideas-allowed zone. It’s really generic, and honestly weighs down Our Hollow, Our Home significantly. Young’s overemphasised Britrock voice on songs like Burial Season and Veil Walker might just be the worst of it, a technique that’s plummeted in stock thanks to how cloying and grating in diction it is, often without fail. It makes this seem amateurish, more than anything, as if the tendencies frequented by local bands from ten years ago are yet to be shed for something better or more fully formed. (Real ones in the UK will remember Lava TV, and recognise how this sounds like the budding bands who’d have one song in rotation there, and would never be heard from again.)
Despite that, though, the aforementioned competence does shine through regardless. Objectively, Our Hollow, Our Home are good at what they do, especially in production that manages to leverage the bigger, Bury Tomorrow-esque sound with even a bit of their melodeath side popping up on Funeral Verse. On the whole—and excluding the treacly, synthetic ballad In Reflection as another relic of the era they came from—Hope & Hell has a core, no-frills heaviness within metalcore that’s pleasantly pure. At least being stuck in the past means the infestation of overproduction has missed Our Hollow, Our Home, which might actually be the main positive to glean from this album. The type of size they brandish is one coming almost squarely from blazing guitars and the reach imbuing them. Hell, Lifeline even siphons some of that into Young’s chorus for an undeniability that has it as easily the best hook on the album.
But is that enough? Well, no, it’s not, but even when vastly skewed to favour the sort of metalcore where Our Hollow, Our Home are adamant to remain, there’s still a pedestrian, heard-it-all-before feel that a couple of choruses won’t salve. And that goes back to the core issue of Hope & Hell’s nonplussed existence. It’s almost like this is done out of obligation, with the rote retellings of metalcore yarns that are supposed to be trusty and tried-and-true but are simply uneventful. It’s fine and achieves what it sets out to, but that’s with a bar deliberately lowered, or kept in dogged immobility despite the myriad of changes going on around it. The writing gives it up almost immediately—even outside of the aforementioned fave “caught in the undertow”, you’d struggle to find a line or phrase that’s clever or reflects more than a blanket setting of ‘emotion’.
It’s unfortunate that this is how Our Hollow, Our Home are choosing to go out, but it’s about right, too. If, by some divine miracle, Young had managed to wrangle up another group to put up with him, another album would’ve sounded exactly the same. It’s just who Our Hollow, Our Home are and have always been—what was impressive, even fairly recently, has shown its age awfully now. That’s more the fault of the changing sound than the band themselves; if you revisited their past work, the likelihood is that they’d also take a bit of a knock. That’s not a consolation, though. It only illustrates the limitations that have been stretched out for too long, coming to an abrupt end almost as a mercy before they decay even further. For Our Hollow, Our Home, they’re leaving the stage where their bangs and whimpers roughly end up as the same volume, and no matter how rock-solid the execution might be, that’ll always be overshadowed. With the sour note they’re bowing out on, there’s barely a source of light to be found anywhere.
For fans of: Bury Tomorrow, Fit For A King, THECITYISOURS
‘Hope & Hell’ by Our Hollow, Our Home is released on 27th September on Arising Empire.
Words by Luke Nuttall
