A long way from ‘Humdrum’: Home Counties dissect their vibrant new album
With new music under more threat than ever, it isn’t easy being a band in today’s climate. Managing to jump through all of the hoops laid out by the industry while avoiding all career-threatening obstacles is draining at the best of times, and for a fledgling act to even make it onto their second album is a gigantic achievement.
Not only have Home Counties managed to survive long enough to see their second record come to fruition, but they’ve barely faltered en route to this momentous point in their career. Granted, they’re not at a level where they’re filling large venues, nor are they in a position to give up their day jobs, but the way in which they’ve relentlessly grafted in order to bring Humdrum into the world is something to be applauded.
Hard work seems to be a principle that the band have always stood by. “Exactly As It Seems, we recorded ourselves every day after work in the evenings,” co-lead vocalist Will Harrison explains of the process of putting together their 2024 debut. “It was a lot of trying to find little pockets of time like that. For this one, we wanted to do it in a condensed space of time, get the demos together and then go into the studio with someone.”
Giving themselves a strict deadline by which they had to have a full album’s worth of material ready to go meant there was less time for tinkering, and a need to commit to ideas the minute they felt tangible enough to pursue. “It doesn’t help that there’s six very strongly opinionated people trying to agree on something,” fellow vocalist Lois Kelly remarks. “I think that helped going in the studio with Al [Doyle] and having someone there to be like, ‘okay, we’re gonna pick something and we’re gonna stick with it’. It definitely moved a lot quicker this time, which was fun, and a new way for us to write.”
Having Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem’s Al Doyle on production duties, marking the first time they’d entrusted this role to someone other than their own guitarist, Conor Kearney, also provided an additional element of pressure that the band hadn’t previously felt. “We were definitely working hard before we got into the studio because we didn’t want to rock up to one of our heroes with crap songs,” Harrison laughs. “It did help coming in with an amount of focus, but also with a degree of knowing what we could give and what could be worked on by Al with his experience.”
However, with Doyle’s experience and innate knack for crafting electronic-infused indie rock, the decision to work with him proved to be a no-brainer for the band, even if Harrison wasn’t there for the initial meeting. “Three people went in, and they all came back and said that it was a lot of fun, and they got to try out all the synths and see how Al works, which is very quickly and instinctively,” Harrison informs us. “I think our horror of what we imagined working with a producer is like is that you sit there and they’re asking you to do take 40 on the drums. He works excitedly, and I think once we knew that was the vibe it would be, we went in and did ‘Spain’ with everyone, which was great.”
Kelly explains that ‘Spain’ was the first song that came together from Humdrum and felt like a finished product, ultimately “set[ting] the tone for the whole thing” as far as the album’s mood and tone was concerned. Proving to be a lot darker and more introspective than Exactly As It Seems, their latest release is not so much an evolution for the band, but a record that reframes their identity, pulling further away from their roots as a janky post-punk act and into one that has far more to say than simply regurgitating the same platitudes as their peers.
“I feel like this record is somehow slightly darker, but also dancier at the same time,” Kelly muses. “Lyrically, there’s been a shift as well. It’s a bit more inward-looking than outward commentary.” While Harrison agrees, he adds that there is a greater range to what’s being explored by both him and Kelly. “It’s a bit more personal lyrically, with more songs about relationships and fundamental universal emotions,” he adds. “I still feel like the record feels fun, and it’s completely framed in that way.”
These days, Harrison’s songwriting appears to be acutely aware of the pitfalls of writing from a limited perspective when you’re younger and less informed of the world around you. “With my previous projects, it was just base level, left-wing preachy, as you are at that age as a first year university student,” he says of his earlier effort, Haze – a band which can now be seen as the precursor to Home Counties. “As you move on, you tire of not going beyond that level of depth, and also move to think more about what your personal place in these different things is.”
He continues, diving into the meaning behind one of the album’s highlights, ‘Meet Me in the Flat Roof’. “It’s a song about the gentrification of pubs, but it’s also more about me and how I have this sort of cultural arrogance around ungentrified places.” While this could have presented itself a little differently in the band’s previous incarnation, adopting more of an unnuanced ‘x good, y bad’ approach to lyricism, Kelly believes that this is a natural way for any songwriter to adapt as they get older and more aware of their surroundings.
“You’re more accepting of how you may react in situations and you’re able to comment on it,” she argues regarding this shift in perspective. “When we were 18, we might not have been able to turn around and explain how we felt about something. We would have just been a bit embarrassed and not mentioned it.”
Kelly’s introduction to the group shortly before they went into the studio to record their debut album proved to be a significant turning point for the band, and prompted a significant amount of the alterations they’ve made to their sound. However, she insists that while joining was fortuitous, it wasn’t something that she’d anticipated happening so quickly.
“I went to school with the guys, so I’ve always been there in the background and going to all the shows,” she explains. “When we recorded ‘Bethnal Green’ on the last album, Will was like ‘this is too high, can you sing it?’ I was just around for dinner, hanging out at their house, so I just jumped on, and then two weeks later, they invited me to come on tour with them. It was a bit of a dive in the deep end, but I was already mates with everybody.”
Rather than simply being an auxiliary addition of a female voice as she perceived herself on the last record, Kelly plays more of an active role in constructing the narratives and melodies on Humdrum. “We’ve established different roles in the musical conversation that’s happening,” she concurs. “We’ve definitely developed from just jumping in to sing a part that Will couldn’t sing, to being really embedded and involved in how the songs are developed, where we both sit at the forefront of the vocals.” Harrison agrees, arguing that her increased involvement makes Humdrum a more focused effort overall. “The lyrics are written for her,” he adds, “they’re not from the perspective of a bloke singing about tax. It’s more considered and personally tailored to who we are.”
With the dual vocalists now a key element of the band’s sound, one of the central ideas of Humdrum was to make this vocal interplay function in a conversational manner. “Throughout the album, the theme of conversation is present in most of the tracks,” Kelly explains. “‘Take You Back’ is one where you’ve got the vocals in reverse at the beginning, and then Will and I are singing on top of each other, and it’s just about conversing but not understanding each other.”
However, while there are points at which the duo are engaging in two different sides of a discussion, Harrison also adds that it didn’t feel necessary to pursue this for the entire duration. “For a lot of the more fun and light-hearted moments on the album, we do just sing in unison, and it’s the same message,” he argues. “I’m not regretful that we didn’t manage to cram in another narrative, but I think it feels natural when we, when we bring a song which could have the two voices.”
Bringing Kelly into the fold does mean that Harrison has had to make certain compromises to his own delivery, especially when it comes to delivering his parts in a shouty sprechgesang fashion that was more prominent on their early releases. “I miss it live, because now I can’t have as much fun and I have to try and sing in tune,” he laughs, although he also insists that melody was always a part of their sound. “A lot of the demos which we never really used when we were in the punky realm were really melodic. We’ve always written melodic music, but we never thought that was Home Counties.”
Kelly pipes up, declaring that there are two camps within the band when it comes to this facet of their sound. “If Conor and I had it our way, there would be stacks of harmonies on everything,” she insists, “but I think it’s really nice how it’s grown into something where it still sounds like Home Counties, but we’ve got the melodies developing in there as well.”
Their older style hasn’t been totally forfeited as a result, though, and Harrison gladly exclaims that there are still flashes of what their early releases brought to the table. “I think there’s little pockets of vintage Home Counties,” he argues. “If you skip to the breakdown of ‘Ravelling’, it sounds like something we could have released five years ago. I guess the end of ‘Meet Me in the Flat Roof’ is quite similar too. We let the guitars rip, and the shouting comes in waves just to get it out, and then we can return to our new, melodic selves.”
However, harking back to their formative years doesn’t always mean that they’re digging up angsty post-punk songs from the archives. Much like ‘Wild Guess’ on the debut, which Harrison scoffs at the original version of (“full-on samba, with an Ed Miliband speech detuned over the top, which obviously had to go”), ‘Cheeseball’ is another song that the band have salvaged from their earliest experiences of writing together. “When me and Dan [Hearn, drums] were little, that was the first song we ever wrote, like the fundamental chorus part,” he divulges. “I wish we could find that demo because it’s horrific. It was originally sung in this horrific falsetto of mine, which sounded so bad.”
Even though Kelly argues that this version of the song was what helped her learn her part, Harrison is glad to have finally managed to repurpose the song in a fashion that doesn’t seem out of place. “That was one of those songs that nearly went on Exactly As It Seems, but I didn’t think it was quite there yet,” he adds. “I felt like we had to get this one out, otherwise it’s coming up on every album – ‘is it ‘Cheeseball’ time?’”
Harrison then casts his mind back to other early musical experiments he did with members of the band, joking that it’s best that these recordings have remained lost. “I remember when we were about 11 or 12, me, Dan and Conor went into a recording studio at a local festival and we recorded a cover of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ complete with a pre-voice break,” he says, grinning with embarrassment. “It had a ‘Walking In The Air’ level of clarity, which just sounded very odd. Belting it out without the rasp of Axl Rose is a beautiful thing.”
Youth and the collective upbringing of the band in the area they take their name from have played a significant role in forming their identity, although Humdrum leans into this a lot less than they’ve done on previous efforts. “Where anyone grows up influences who they become, and obviously that impacts your art,” Kelly insists. “I think on the last record, it was a bit more prominent, singing about moving to the city and leaving country life behind, but not so much with this record.”
Harrison agrees, dismissing the idea that the home counties are still a critical influence on Home Counties. “I don’t think this is an album informed by that,” he disputes. “We’d obviously made In A Middle English Town and Redevelopment, the EPs, which were very much rooted in a critique of that world and moving to London, but this album is less placed in that transition period.”
He does, however, concede that ‘Roundabout’ stems from a late-night demoing session done with plenty of alcohol flowing, where he began riffing on lyrics about Buckinghamshire’s favourite local punchline. “I got on the mic and just started singing ‘I was in Milton Keynes, driving around the roundabout’ and all this stuff, and we started putting in loads of beeps and car noises,” he laughs. “We went into the studio thinking ‘how the hell are we going to get proper lyrics to this song?’ because once we’d shown all our friends the songs, they all thought it was the best one. My family are all from Milton Keynes originally, and at uni I did my dissertation on town redevelopment and a lot about the building of Milton Keynes. I guess that’s perpetually stuck in my head now.”
Expanding on everything that the debut had to offer and showcasing a more mature side to the band, Humdrum is Home Counties’ most complete statement to date, and if fortune works in their favour, will hopefully bring them even more rewards and acclaim than Exactly As It Seems did. With ‘Uptight’ having made it onto the official soundtrack for the EA FC25 video game, something the band still can’t quite believe they were selected for, their attention turns to what would be an equally appropriate ‘pinch me’ moment for this album campaign.
“The first thing that springs to mind is having the opening song on a really cool TV show or something,” Kelly suggests. Harrison casts his mind back to his time spent studying in Bristol for his suggestion. “A Skins reboot would be the dream,” he jests. “I can imagine ‘Roundabout’ with the characters coughing in the back of the car going up and down Park Street.”
For an album centred around growing up and self-discovery, with the creators at the centre of it going through a second coming-of-age, it certainly feels apt.
