When The Hotelier released their sophomore album, Home, Like Noplace Is There, in 2014, the young Worcester band suddenly became one of the most talked about acts in indie rock. Championed by music journalists from all corners of the Internet as one of the most important players in the recent emo revival, The Hotelier are set to release their third album, Goodness, on May 27.

I recently sat down with the band’s 24-year-old frontman, Christian Holden, to talk about what it’s like being a band on the rise in Worcester.

Has The Hotelier always been a Worcester band?
We all went to high school together in Dudley. I’m really the only one that lives in Worcester right now. Sam [drums] lives in Dudley, and Chris [guitar] lives in Boston. But if any place feels like a hometown for our band, it’s Worcester.

Were there many opportunities for bands to play in Dudley? Was it mostly house shows?
Shows would always be at a VFW or a Knights of Columbus or an Elks Lodge… some sort of town space like that. It was never really house shows. Worcester had some more house shows when we started going to shows here, but even then, the house venues here felt way different.

Like the Firehouse [a local housing co-op], which still kind of feels like a firehouse, even though it’s also a house venue?
Yeah. Same with The Shop, which is actually, like, this really large space and doesn’t look like a house space at all, even though it kind of is.

It seems like the scene here is built around those types of places.
I think it’s always revolved around these collective living spaces that are more activist-minded, or at least more community-minded. There’s an understanding that instead of paying rent to a landlord, we’re all paying for this spot that will continue on, and we’ll try to live collectively and cheaply, as well as efficiently and intentionally.

Is that low cost of living one of the factors that keeps you in Worcester?
Not entirely. I think in most cities you can probably find a spot with a low cost of living. Here you can live cheaply and also not have it really affect the communities that you’re moving into. It seems like in Brooklyn, you can find a cheap place to live, but it’s usually in areas that developers are building up and trying to make cool and hip and, basically, whiter. Then the rent goes up for everyone. Here, it seems like people are more concerned with how they are living than where they are living.

Do you think that being removed from established scenes like Brooklyn and Philadelphia makes it easier to avoid making music that caters to the expectations of a certain crowd?
Yeah, I think there’s less pressure to have the accepted sound. With the Berklee kids in Boston, or the hipper art kids in Brooklyn, or the punks in Philly, there may be a thread that goes through all their stuff that I don’t find in Worcester, which I think is good and refreshing.

Do you plan on staying in Worcester?
Yeah. I have so many friends here and there are so many projects that I feel connected to here that there’s no reason for me to move… If I had to hide for a while, I know where I’d go.

Can you divulge that information?
[Laughs] No… then it would be unhidden.

– Liam Hart