Home Front – Watch It Die
It should come as no surprise that Graeme MacKinnon, vocalist of Home Front, is a record collector. From the release of their debut EP Think of the Lie, the Edmonton band’s music has been a showcase for their infectious songwriting and curatorial eclecticism alike, bridging the gaps between punk rock energy, synth-pop brightness and gothic, post-punk darkness. They’re just as likely to nod to punk icons like The Jam as they are to Depeche Mode or Ministry. Home Front are a punk band at their core—their energy and immediacy are unmistakable as anything else—but the neon synths wrapped around their driving rhythms and cloak of Cure-like gloom they peer through is a reminder that punk is just a starting point for the band, not the destination.
Since the release of Home Front’s debut album Games of Power, they graduated from being solely a studio project for MacKinnon and Clint Frazier into a full-fledged live band. They’ve been known to steal the show at a hardcore fest, despite not being a hardcore band in any strict sense, on the strength of that live energy, which they’ve harnessed and channeled back into their sound on their outstanding sophomore album Watch It Die. Technically speaking, Home Front as a studio project is still a separate entity than the five-piece band that wrecks stages, but to hear something as driving and powerful as the title track that kicks off their new album, you might never realize it’s a duo behind that anthemic roar.
Watch It Die is an album of broader and brighter horizons, as the band taps into the pop sensibility that’s been a key part of their sound but never with the warmth and immediacy that they display here. The single “Light Sleeper” juxtaposes new wave synth romanticism with guitars steeped in post-punk gloom, rising up into a soaring chorus of “We’re born alone! We die alone!” But what initially seems like a nihilistic cry is buoyed by hope and community: “Don’t ever think you have to/Live alone.” “Between the Waves” floats on a featherlight bed of bubbly synth arpeggios, while the band taps into old-school Vince Clarke new wave balladry on “The Vanishing,” its motorik pulse the only thing keeping it from fully defying gravity.
Where Home Front’s most approachable pop moments are to be found on Watch It Die, so are some of their hardest driving industrial pulses and most feral punk snarls. The EBM/darkwave menace of “New Madness” is custom-fit for the goth club and the pit alike, whereas “For the Children (Fuck All)” is, despite its drum-machine rhythm, old-school punk through and through, right down to its generation-left-behind chant of “Fuck all is all that’s left for us!” And they’ve never sounded as unabashedly danceable as they do on “Kiss the Sky,” a slice of melancholy hedonism that they wear well.
Though Home Front embrace darkness on an aesthetic level and, to a certain extent, in MacKinnon’s meditations on mortality and the labor required to keep on going in a cruel and unforgiving world. But on Watch It Die they’re neither defeated nor even necessarily defined by that darkness, embracing a romanticism that reveals itself in some of their prettiest moments, like the infectious if mournful “Eulogy” (“I still hear your voice/Even though the picture blurs every year“) or the dense, shoegazey closer “Empire.” In bolstering their multifaceted post-punk sound with a little more light, the catharsis they provide feels a lot more like hope.
Label: La Vida Es Un Mus
Year: 2025
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Home Front : Watch It Die
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