Open Door Policy

After a two-album stale patch a decade ago, The Hold Steady have rebounded to become more adventurous than they were before, and Finn’s storytelling has never been stronger.

Open Door Policy is the album longtime fans have been waiting for. The lyrics are there and the music is there.

[The band] sound like they’re grabbing at big choruses like an alcoholic scrabbling for a bedside breakfast whisky. But on The Feelers, the motoric Spices and Me & Magdalena, Craig Finn’s sneered diatribe about a manipulative rock junkie, they nonetheless stumble across a rich, National-like lustre of dark grooves and opiated euphoria.

Now, they’ve unveiled their eighth collection of poetically punky musical works which carries their fresh momentum to expansive heights.

Expressed from a first person point of view, the music comes across with a sense of unease, urgency and uncertainty, which, in turn, boosts both interest and intrigue. Clearly, The Hold Steady are intent on burrowing below the surface in their pursuit of principle and propriety.

By focusing on bringing light and shade into the margins, the Hold Steady wound up with an album that feels vivid and alive; it's as if the songs themselves have a life outside of the recording.

Open Door Policy is quite possibly the best Hold Steady album since 2008’s Stay Positive.

If art mimics life, then Open Door Policy's musical tension, timely themes and efforts to reimagine the band while remaining authentic deftly capture today's world.

The band’s ability to get to the heart of this change and create compelling songs from familiar scenes helps make Open Door Policy the best Hold Steady album in over a decade.

A confident reiteration of this singular group's virtues. [Mar 2021, p.38]

However often the band has been saddled with being “earnest,” their way of contrasting rock‘n’roll catharsis with personal devastation is also inherently ironic. This sense is more obvious than ever on Open Door Policy.

Their insistence for organic compositions stands out thoughtfully on Open Door Policy, and it reminds us precisely why we fell in love with The Hold Steady in the first place. Despite them being slightly aged rockers, they haven’t forgotten what it means to rock out and to give in to the desire shout at the top of your lungs when you are struggling.

While the album isn’t quite the overhaul that quote makes it out to be, there are enough twists to catch longtime fans off guard. Even with eight albums to their name, The Hold Steady continue to prove that consistency doesn’t mean going stale.

This is a lovely, lovely piece of work from a band that are still to produce a dud.

There’s little in the way of new ground broken here, but it's consistent nonetheless.

The lyrics on the eighth THS album are as vivid as ever, and the guitars ring true. [Feb 2021, p.73]

The band neither seems content to sit back and play the hits nor to break the formula too much. Perhaps that ambivalence holds Open Door Policy from ranking among their best, but The Hold Steady clearly have more to say and do in their second act, and the record points to how rewarding the possibilities can be.

The quieter songs don’t always burn so brightly. Here, there can be a fine line between balladry and pedestrianism, but the listener is never far away from a killer lyric.

On the band’s newest release, Open Door Policy, The Hold Steady moves to fully incorporate Finn’s more muted solo offerings, and the result is a disjointed transitional work.