Not Abel

Most songs about brothers are songs about loyalty or rupture. "Not Abel" is about something more uncomfortable: the experience of reading an ancient story of fratricide and finding yourself on the wrong side of it, with a surprising amount of sympathy for the murderer. It is the fourth track on Hop Along's fourth album, and it is one of the most structurally restless things the band has recorded.

Over about four and a half minutes^[1] it moves from a hushed, string-touched opening into something loud, jagged and rhythmically stuttering. That shape is not an accident, and it is part of the song's argument. A story we think we know turns out to be much harder to hold still than we assumed.

Where the song came from

Hop Along are a Philadelphia band led by Frances Quinlan, who writes the songs, plays guitar and sings, alongside her brother Mark Quinlan on drums. Bark Your Head Off, Dog came out on Saddle Creek on April 6, 2018, after being written across 2016 and 2017 and recorded at Headroom, guitarist Joe Reinhart's home studio in Philadelphia.^[1] (The detail that a band built around a sibling pair made a song about the first siblings in scripture is hard to ignore, though Quinlan has never framed it as autobiography.)

The immediate spark was a book. Quinlan has said the song was partly inspired by Karl Ove Knausgaard's A Time for Everything, a novel that retells stories from the Bible, including Cain and Abel, through a domestic and ordinary lens.^[2] She has described the book as one that talks about the lives of people in the Bible in a way scripture itself does not, and she recommends it warmly.^[3] Reading it changed how she saw the characters. By her account, Cain becomes increasingly sympathetic over the course of the book.^[2]

The song was released as the second single from the album in February 2018, ahead of the full record.^[2] Quinlan has also explained that it is, in a way, two songs. The ending came first, written while the band jammed in the studio of the Philadelphia band Dr. Dog, and the first half was built to lead into it later.^[3] You can hear that seam. The song does not so much develop as arrive somewhere it was not originally headed.

Cain as a person instead of a symbol

The Genesis account of Cain and Abel is famously spare. Two brothers bring offerings, one is favored and the other is not, and the rejected one kills his brother. Readers have spent millennia filling in the missing motive. Knausgaard's version, and Quinlan's song in its wake, do the same thing but from the inside, treating the resentment as a human feeling rather than a theological category.

That is why the song reads, in Spin's phrasing of it, less as a contest of good against evil and more as a story driven by jealousy and a tangled bond between two brothers.^[4] Cain is not a monster in this telling. He is someone who was overlooked, who nursed that wound, and who acted on it. The title itself performs a small piece of refusal. It names the one person the narrator is not, and in doing so quietly admits which of the two brothers feels closer.

The lyrics move through the perspective of someone observing and then inhabiting the actions of biblical figures, and the song stays with the physical, ordinary texture of that world rather than staging it as grand myth.^[2] That choice matters. A man holding a grudge over a fair-seeming slight is a familiar figure in any kitchen, workplace or family. The song lets the ancient story shrink to that scale, and then lets the scale prove nothing about how contained the damage will be.

Sympathy as a problem

Quinlan's own comments point to the song's real subject. Of the process of examining beliefs, she has said it is a funny thing to try, and she added that sympathy and understanding complicate everything too much.^[2] That is a striking thing to admit about moral stories. The usual function of a parable is to make judgment easy. Once you begin to understand the person who did the terrible thing, the lesson gets harder to extract.

This is a theme that runs through the whole album. A review for NPR described Bark Your Head Off, Dog as a study in intense introspection and frustration, concerned with abuses of power, self-serving moral posturing, wrongful convictions, and the cruelty of nature, and noted how memoir and fiction blur across the lyrics.^[5] Seen against that backdrop, "Not Abel" is the record's clearest case of a narrator trying to sit in judgment and finding the chair uncomfortable. The same instinct appears in other songs about being judged, being believed, or deciding who gets to count as innocent.

Asked whether she is religious, Quinlan answered that she does not really know how she feels.^[3] The honesty of that answer is part of what makes the song work. It is not a sermon and not a rejection of faith. It is the posture of someone who has taken a sacred story seriously enough to be troubled by it.

How the music tells it

The structure matters as much as the subject. The song opens in a gentler, folk-tinged register before pivoting into a harder, pop-punk-leaning passage, and the shift feels less like a planned dramatic climax than like a loosening of control. That fits the story. Cain's act is not a slow tragedy with a visible build. It is a break.

The NPR reviewer singled out the rhythm section for this track, saying bassist Tyler Long and drummer Mark Quinlan make it stutter and groove in a way little else in the band's catalog does.^[5] That stutter gives the song a body. Even when the narrative is abstract, the pulse is physical, and the lurching feel suits a story about impulse overcoming restraint.

Then there is Frances Quinlan's voice, which is the band's signature. The same review praised her acrobatic melodic lines, which enter unexpectedly and sometimes break a sentence mid-phrase.^[5] In a song where understanding and judgment keep pulling against each other, a voice that cracks, leaps and recovers is an apt vehicle. She sounds like someone arguing with the story as she tells it.

Quinlan also told an interviewer that she tried to remain flexible with her vocals as the band's arrangements kept changing, and that she has trouble letting her lyrics go.^[3] Both traits are audible. The vocal refuses to settle into a single reading of the material, and so does the song.

An album built on revision

Bark Your Head Off, Dog was widely praised. It holds a Metacritic score of 81 from 14 reviews, with Pitchfork at 8.0 out of 10 and Exclaim! and Drowned in Sound at 9 out of 10.^[1] Critics described it as warmer and more spacious than its predecessor, Painted Shut, with harps, mandolins, fiddles and vocoders appearing among the more familiar guitars.^[1] Quinlan has said the band gave themselves a couple of extra weeks to explore the songs and add strings, and that she is glad every record is a change.^[3] Quinlan also painted the album's cover, an abstract landscape.^[1]

In that context, "Not Abel" is a kind of thesis for the record's method. Songs are allowed to change shape midstream. Narrators are allowed to doubt their own verdicts. Old stories are allowed to be rewritten by the person who is reading them.

Other ways to hear it

The most literal reading is the one above: a retelling of Cain's story with the murderer humanized. But the song has plausible alternatives. One is that it works as a quiet portrait of sibling rivalry in general, the favored child and the passed-over child, with Genesis as the vocabulary rather than the subject. Given the band's family makeup, some listeners hear that, though nothing Quinlan has said supports an autobiographical claim.

A second reading focuses on judgment itself. If the song is partly about how hard it is to condemn someone once you understand them, it connects directly to the album's recurring preoccupation with institutions and individuals deciding who is guilty. Cain becomes a test case for compassion without absolution.

A third reading is purely formal. Because the ending was written first and the front half added later, you could hear the whole piece as a song about hindsight, in which the violent outcome is already fixed and the narrative has to be reverse-engineered to explain how anyone could arrive there.^[3]

Why it resonates

Plenty of songs borrow biblical figures for gravitas. Fewer ask what it would feel like to be one of them on an unremarkable day. "Not Abel" earns its place by refusing the easy comfort of the moral, and by letting its music misbehave the way its characters do.

It also resonates because the feeling at its center is so common and so rarely sung about directly: the sting of being passed over, and the dangerous fantasy that someone else's fortune is the reason for your own pain. The song does not tell the listener to forgive Cain. It simply makes it harder to pretend he is a stranger.

Conclusion

Hop Along took one of the oldest stories in the Western canon and made it smaller, stranger and more recognizable. By treating Cain as a person, Quinlan found the point where understanding stops being a comfort and starts being a burden. The song's lurching, two-part shape carries that burden without resolving it.

That lack of resolution may be its deepest honesty. As Quinlan herself admitted, sympathy and understanding make things harder.^[2] "Not Abel" lives inside that difficulty, and it asks the listener to stay there a little longer than is comfortable.