The consensus critical acclaim for Hop Along’s sophomore LP, Painted Shut, felt like a foregone conclusion, and the band’s singer and songwriter Frances Quinlan was given the title of the best voice in indie rock without much dissent. But Google “Hop Along Get Disowned Review", and you’ll see that the band’s proper 2012 debut (Quinlan had released a solo album under the name) was as universally overlooked as Painted Shut was universally praised. With its swift reissue on Saddle Creek, Get Disowned now feels like it could’ve been Painted Shut’s complicated, difficult follow-up, but one that stands to be just as beloved, because this band remains virtually peerless in indie rock.
In 2012, Hop Along weren’t the robust, road-tested band that could be tasked with warming up amphitheaters for heartland indie acts like the War on Drugs, Modest Mouse, and Dr. Dog. Get Disowned's original release also happened at least a year before any of the narratives that would either directly or peripherally benefit the band—Philadelphia emerging as the nation’s indie rock capital, the emo revival, mainstream attention to Fest, the annual October weekend in Gainesville, Fla., that serves as a proving ground for many of the bands responsible for those first two narratives. Praise would eventually start to accumulate, the most notable being a tweet where blink–182’s Mark Hoppus called this record’s “Tibetan Pop Stars” “the most painfully beautiful song ever.”
Whatever your qualms with the source, Hoppus’ words reached an audience for whom a blink-182 cosign could make a difference. And you know what? “Tibetan Pop Stars” is painfully beautiful, though perhaps not as indicative of any vestigial emo roots as the nearly seven-minute song written from the perspective of a talking mattress, serving as an impartial arbiter in a breakup that just won’t end (“Laments”). But along with beautiful pain and painful beauty, “Tibetan Pop Stars” is also really, really funny, with Quinlan seeking escape from being tied down in any way, especially a boring relationship. And if anyone did ask her about her significant other, fuck something as basic as “he’s in Canada”: Quinlan’s beau is a seducer of Tibetan pop stars and connoisseur of luxury automobiles. It’s the work of a whimsical, wild imagination, but it's also an alibi, one that will probably get the asker to let the subject drop and leave her alone.
The humor of Get Disowned may have deflected from just how brutally honest and devastating it is. In 2012, Quinlan described her ultimate songwriting goal as, “finding [a] character and creating a world,” which seemed more in line with the literary, referential Painted Shut than it does with the songs here. The tragedies and personal failings on Get Disowned feel more like autobiography—“Trouble Found Me” expresses the horrifying imagery of her stepfather after suffering a catastrophic accident (“you came in with your jaw torn, still talking”), along with the vivid memories of technicalities that tend to stick with trauma sufferers. Quinlan remembers things like the chicken in the oven before arriving to the hospital and seeing nurses playing poker while a blind man convalesces in the next bed over. The account of a family friend’s death on the rollicking roots-rocker “Sally II” starts with a literally breathtaking mention of “that unsettling smell had gotten into all the tenants’ rooms,” and it’s the mundane forensic details that are even more unnerving: the apartment is littered with weightlifting magazines and a piece of junk mail with a fake million-dollar check (“you thought it was the real thing”).
Get Disowned is a meditation on death and loss every bit as compelling as Southeastern, Benji, or Carrie & Lowell, and boasts more inventive language than any of them. But Hop Along, in part because the project was so new, initially had a harder time getting noticed. And while Quinlan’s voice is unusually expressive—she often screams and restrains herself at the same time, so it sounds like her lungs might burst—it rarely sounds objectively sad in a way that immediately conveys gravitas or fragility to a casual listener. Play “Sally II” at a party, ask a friend what it’s about and see how close they get to “an older man dying alone in his apartment.”
The record’s most pressing issue may be one that was hit upon in an interview with Quinlan and her brother Mark, Hop Along’s drummer. Frances described the prevailing theme of Get Disowned as “baggage,” to which Mark added, “not being able to have your mistakes written off just because you’re young.” Right there, the siblings touched the nerve that rightfully triggers a shudder in anyone who’s been the target of all those “why can’t these entitled millennials just wash their cereal bowls like we did in the good ol’ days?”-style pieces, written by someone who refuses to take ownership of the degraded world they’ve left for the younger generation. It feels like the Quinlans were speaking to how people can be seriously damaged by their youth and still not be taken seriously.
Sure, kids might learn to process and turn these experiences into assets—“Hop Along” itself was a nickname given to Quinlan in high school for being a slow walker. Or they may repress them and have them mutate into something uglier and intractable that continues throughout their lives. Even if a middle-schooler is aware of what’s at stake in the upcoming presidential election or reads an article about Flint’s water crisis, if they got picked on at school, that’s probably the most important thing in the world to them right now. Get Disowned lends dignity to the truth that each person’s struggle and recovery is theirs, regardless of how it may present to outsiders or how it seems relative to more pervasive and global concerns. As Hop Along would soon find out, the first step to a breakthrough is just to be heard.
