Home Counties talk anxiety and miscommunication in ‘Humdrum’
The band uses fast-paced synths to scream about bad memories and news headlines.
★★★★☆
Photo: Luca Bailey
London-based sextet Home Counties have released their second studio album Humdrum today via Submarine Cat Records. Humdrum follows the band’s debut full-length album, Exactly As It Seems, and the album’s singles Humdrum, Spain, and New Best Thing. The band is touring the album throughout Europe over the next few months.
The album opens with Take You Back, a track that largely defines the band’s sound in this album. Energetic and unexpected, the back-and-forth play between vocalists Will Harrison and Lois Kelly in this track gives it an almost playful energy. The overlapping of vocals and lines like “Speaking in tongues / In vernacular” helps the band establish a recurring theme of communication and miscommunication throughout the album.
Take You Back is followed by Humdrum. The album’s title track and a single from the band, Humdrum recalls times of lying in bed and thinking about all of the better and more clever things you could have said. In contradiction to its name, the title track uses contradicting beats and sounds to reflect messy feelings and miscommunications. The track is an unexpected blend of 80s retro electronic sounds and raw, folky vocal harmonies. This wacky texture is adopted from the very beginning of the single, which introduces a fuzzy synthesised sound rubbing against a purposefully offbeat drum.
In the album’s third track, Spain, Harrison sings about growing up and changing from a hopeful child into a realistic and somewhat negative adult. The track takes on a darker synth song compared to the previous tracks, and ends with an unexpected sped-up verse which lifts the spirits of the track with the lines “As the temp rips up high 20s / Glass half full, not empty / And I feel at home rather than an intruder / I don’t know if it’s a dream or my future.”
New Best Thing is short and snappy. About the kind of overconfidence that comes with driving a fast car, the song gets its title from being so confident that someone thinks they’re the “new best thing”. This track acts as a brief and blissful palette cleanser while the album switches tone.
When in Rome follows as a long and mostly instrumental track. The song was written during and about riots throughout 2024, and specifically speaks out against classist arguments. Some of the band’s most powerful lyrics, like “There’s something about violence/ That binds us all together in our difference,” and — in the song’s second verse — “With the deepest respect, justified by context / Condescendingly, like they got no choice in it, like there isn’t a limit?” are found in this track. A powerful midpoint to the album, the track mixes overarching themes of communication with relevant stances on justice and politics.
Meet Me In The Flat Roof is the album’s sixth track and continues to display the band’s dedication to writing about current issues. The track, taking on a more techno-forward beat, focuses on gentrification; favourite spots staying the same or changing dramatically. In between verses, Harrison’s vocals become muffled, as if coming through the phone on the wall in an old bar, saying “People like them coming in here and driving the prices up / It was £3.10 last year, £4.90 now”.
Ravelling takes a step back from emotionally heavy matters to return to the album’s original themes of communication. This time, the band uses lines “Never turns out just the way you thought” and “Doesn’t help that that’s the way we’re taught” to talk about miscommunications and unnecessary arguments on social media.
Next up, Cheeseball (whose title comes from the original version of the track, which the band wrote during their teenage years) fittingly covers topics of angsty teenage and young adulthood, like parties and questioning if the future will be anything you’d hoped. Harrison sings, “So tell me what do you get out of it when you start believing your own bullshit? / I know you’re thinking that the future’s bleak, but it’s getting so much harder to attention seek”. Lines which set themselves apart as some of the best of the album find their place almost unexpectedly in this track.
Track nine, Roundabout, is another fast-moving and fun track, this time continuing a similar story from the last track to paint a picture of a conversation at a party. The harmonised vocals sing “Up and down and all around” and later “can you get off your roundabout?” as an inner monologue while listening to someone drone on and on about themselves. The track is a final playful dig at the album’s communicative themes.
Final track, Like That, is a slightly shorter and far more simplistic track than the rest of the album. Slowing down to let the listener go, the track focuses on the anxiety that comes from being hungover and remembering all the things you said. Kelly sings, “Why’d I go say that / To a group of people whose / Parents bought their flats / I guess I never learnt to schmooze, like they did” before the track transitions into one final chorus that ends the album.
Humdrum creates a balance between the big and small issues that live in each of our heads every day, and it does so with a (mostly misleadingly) upbeat sound that keeps us listening and moving along.
Humdrum is out now via Submarine Cat Records. Buy a physical copy of the album here.