On the deluxe version of their 2024 album Staring at the Sun, out on February 27th, Hotel Fiction pulls back the curtain on the early years of their singular creative partnership, crystallizing the first phase of their music as they prepare to move into the next. Featuring additional songs from their early years writing together, Jade Ireland Long (piano, vocals) and Jess Thompson (guitar, vocals) have created a time capsule that captures their sonic and emotional journey up to this point.
Revisiting this time meant revisiting the start of their musical partnership in 2018 at the University of Georgia in Athens, where they became fast best friends. Their breakout first single “Astronaut Kids” amassed over 2 million streams, and they’ve spent the last four years touring heavily, where they gained a reputation for their electric live shows, headlining and touring in support of bands like flipturn, Beach Fossils, and hey, nothing. But what began as a college friendship has deepened into a kind of full-blown musical telepathy. “We know each other’s musical language, like it’s a second language,” says Thompson. “It’s always felt like we kind of have the same brain when it comes to music,” adds Jade.
It’s a telepathy on full display on the deluxe release of Staring at the Sun, which across 14 tracks—including four new songs—ranges from nostalgic indie rock to intimate indie folk. For the album, they went back into their archives to find additional songs that felt similar to its sonic world. They wrote “Girl In My Head” a guitar-heavy, driving anthem about insecurity, and “Hollywood” a plucky lullaby for fame, when they were still in college, going through the emotions of figuring out who they were as people, while “Staring at the Sun,” which channels the apocalyptic feel of the world at that time, still rings remarkably true.
Because there’s something timeless about Hotel Fiction. Whether it be complex stacks of shimmering harmonies, penetrating lyrics, or nostalgic melodies on glistening guitars, they write music that’s intensely relatable. The music has a theatrical bent in its ease of storytelling; Ireland and Thompson are troubadours traversing a range of sounds and stories as they relay the struggles of seeing friends move away, relationships, dopamine addictions, and heartbreak, while staying grounded by nature, which evokes a connection to something deeper, to something ancestral. Your early 20s are a cliff—you can fall, you can soar, you can enjoy the view. Hotel Fiction captures all these beats in stunning clarity.
Re-releasing such a personal body of work based on emotions they’ve trudged up is a strange experience. “You feel proud of the things that you made and how deeply we leaned into our emotions,” says Ireland. “But then there’s also this sense when we play them over and over on tour or when we’re getting ready to release this body of work again, of feeling almost cyclically stuck in a lot of those emotions because the art does carry a lot of emotional weight. It’s a mix of feeling like, wow, these things still ring true. Is that because they’ve evolved for us or because nothing’s changed?”
Staring At The Sun may harken back to an earlier time, but the crux of the project is still and will always be their friendship. No matter what else changes, that’s what will remain their guiding force. “We’re traveling on this journey together. We’ve always said we’re soul sisters, but it does feel like that kind of different closeness that feels familial and deeper,” says Thompson. “We’re always trying to deepen that connection and want to be a close part of each other’s lives and create together.”
That communal aspect extends to the project as a whole. They recorded the album in their producer Tommy Trautwein’s bedroom, which lent itself towards a close and communal experience. Ireland and Thompson still live in Athens, which not only has a robust artistic community they’re heavily involved in, but its proximity to nature allows them to live at a slower pace that’s conducive to creativity. It’s a project that’s tactile and intensely personal; their hearts aren’t just in Hotel Fiction—their hearts are Hotel Fiction. Ireland paints all of the album covers and designs their merch, and the pair has directed several of their music videos together. In a time when so much of society is taking an individualistic path, Hotel Fiction is more rooted in partnership and community than ever. “We really value and are trying to show that two women can both put their whole hearts into something and have it be communal and beautiful,” says Thompson, “while also honoring them as individuals.”
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