Ground Control Touring

Home Front holds on to a particular kind of passion. The sort of thing that guides you - like a climbing vine steadily blanketing your bests and worsts, cutting through changes and impasses; victory and loss. This passion, their drive, is what makes a record like Watch it Die feel just right. For decades Graeme Mackinnon and Clint Frazier have embedded themselves in grass roots music making, community building, and the overpowering ebbs and flows of diy punk. With Home Front they have given their lifetime of experience a chance to distill and then power into this musically omnipotent project which equally conjures textured Tangerine Dream sounds in a film montage, or the pummelling soundtrack to the first steps taken towards winning the fight of your life.

After a year plus on the road with a full band of talented musicians - Brandi Strauss and Ian Rowley of the brilliant Rhythm of Cruelty, and Alberta’s Chuck Biscuits/house drummer Warren Oostlander - playing to sold out venues all over the world, Home Front have supercharged their take on the peaks of punk-connected pop music into a nuanced grip of hugely memorable songs. Mackinnon expounds on the definitive lessons of the road saying “The experience of realizing the songs live with a full band, and the immediate reaction from an audience tells us as composers what works and what doesn’t. What can move a crowd and what we want to bring to the table that isn’t being done at the moment.”

There are no lazy vibe-tech’d “maybe’s” on this record, no pouting echoes of stylistic dilettantism. The nod to influences and the themes of the lyrics are direct and detailed while maintaining enough creative distance to feel universal and unique. The production has again been bolstered by a team of long time confidants making a huge and unique record under the humble and hard working circumstances of remote

pre-production and choosing to do their recording in home studios in their home town in Edmonton, Alberta.

On previous recordings Games of Power (2023) and Think of the Lie (2021), Frazier and Mackinnon gave us a snapshot of a cynical and alienating world. A place where hope was tempered by insignificance, exhaustion takes us, and where 2,000,000 voices screaming in unison can still go unheard.

Watch It Die instead of asking us why and how we got here, struggling to cope with the sadness of a desperate world, brings us their “step forward” moment. A dose of optimism and ownership in the bleakest of times in which maybe it doesn’t have to feel so bad to be alone or desperate. Where the passage of time is not coloured by the nostalgia of a lost youth but more toward the celebration of wisdom earned. Watch it Die owns the ills it describes and catapults us alongside its creators who have the confidence and presence of mind to live beyond their limitations.

Mackinnon bluntly explains, “This record is about death in a metamorphic way. We transform from stage to stage of life, with death being one of the stages before rebirth.” Their optimism is ever present with profound zen in lyrics like “You Pick The Wild Ones Off The Vine, to Watch It Die” which Mackinnon explains that “with the right amount of sun and water we grow into wild blooming flowers and one day are plucked out of the ground, separated from our roots for someone else’s gain…they use us when we are fully bloomed, then watch us die for their gain. The hopeful part of the lyric, is that while one part withers away, other parts defiantly germinate in the air to grow stronger and multiply. Like the Lotus flower that can bloom even in the harshest of conditions and whose seeds are the ones who will carry on.”

Songs like “Light Sleeper”, “New Madness”, “For The Children (F*ck All)”, and “Always This Way”, send energy waves rattling through speakers with all the urgency and volume of post punk/new wave/street punk. Then we find groovy floor fillers like “Kiss The Sky” and “Dancing With Anxiety,” which toy with samples and textures previously only hinted at on Home Front’s previous records. The symmetry of the album is completed by future hits/slowdances/soundtrack favourites like the melancholically beautiful “Between the Waves” and end-of-the-world-esque showstopper “Eulogy.” Both standouts in their own right but especially in the catalogue of the band to date.

Watch it Die is a road map to how Home Front’s favorite records inadvertently interlock. In the front seat of the (punk to pop to indie to wherever we are now) progress of the 80s/90s/00s we saw departures and changes, lifts and shifts and sounds and style that were rapidly left behind as the years marched on - now we see the real almanac of just how relevant the rhythmic complexity of Killing Joke is to the saccharine minimalism of OMD; how the mainstream appeal of Spandau Ballet is relevant to the mistaken “electronic” drums of The Oppressed. All amongst boisterous guitars that wouldn’t be out of place in the hands of Steve Jones writing for Gene October.

The band knows now better than ever what they must do to make a record that can truly be theirs -

“I think since ‘Games Of Power’, Home Front has developed a new gear when it comes to writing music. I think this project resonates with people, because we listen to so many different types of music, where someone who got into the band because of one flavour might get turned onto by another. We like to imagine how even the hardest of cider punks are listening to Velvet Underground or Brian Eno when the dust clears from the raw punk party.”

The architecture of Watch it Die is simple - 12 songs of danceable, hummable, rousing and honest music that only Home Front could make. Music for a Flock of Skinheads, selvedge 501s for the blitz kids, disco for the HB Strut. The emotion of this LP is what solidifies these musical notions into meaningful art. “For us, ultimately, this is music that comes out of loss and heartbreak and failure, but I hope people have a good time listening to us. You can get rowdy, you can get emotional, you can do whatever you want, but maybe with all of that freedom, we all take a second to reflect on all our fallen brothers and sisters and friends who may have slipped away.”

Watch It Die continues along the path of Games of Power, but it isn’t just a sequel. It is a road map of hope which “speaks about our own humanity, a rebirth into a new world and how we can never go back to the way things were. We suffer for their dreams, but in saying that we must recognize the importance of our own community and look to energize them to build a better way of life.”