- La Vida Es Un Mus Discos
- 2025
Home Front figured something out. The Edmonton band started out as a studio project from two guys. Singer Graeme MacKinnon used to lead the Wednesday Night Heroes, a fired-up street-punk band that began its decade-long run in the late ’90s. Multi-instrumentalist Clint Frazier was in Shout Out Out Out Out, an extremely of-their-moment dance-punk band who got a bit of blog attention in the mid-’00s stretch when stuff like that got blog attention. It doesn’t necessarily make sense to combine those two bands’ approaches, but MacKinnon and Frazier did it anyway, and they came up with something special. Home Front’s 2023 debut Games Of Power was a wild synth-punk wonder, a ferocious fusion of bloopy-moody ’80s techno-pop and charged-up brick-to-the-face oi. Together, those things made their own strange kind of sense.
Home Front weren’t the first to figure that combination out. Blitz were one of the biggest, most important bands to come out of the initial oi explosion in the UK. In 1983, they took a hard turn into synths-and-drum-machines new wave on their sophomore LP Second Empire Justice. It’s a fascinating record, a peek into an alternate world where New Order made fists-up skinhead anthems. Naturally, Blitz’s audience hated it, and the band broke up soon afterward. Years later, you might still hear old punks shaking their heads over the moment that Blitz decided to go disco. Together, Graeme MacKinnon and Clint Frazier made an important discovery. They figured out that Second Empire Justice is fucking awesome and that you could make an entire band out of that sound.
Home Front were a two-man operation when they made Games Of Power. MacKinnon and Frazier started recording together during the pandemic, and they made the album with Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco before they had a live band put together. The record came up on the great DIY punk label La Vida Es Un Mus Discos, and it blew minds. Much like Chubby & The Gang’s debut Speed Kills, another Jonah Falco-produced record that came out on the same label, Games Of Power showed how much creative juice you could still get from playing around with oi, a genre that’s often deeply conservative and tradition-minded. That’s not even a criticism; it’s just how things are. In oi, you could come off as a mad futurist simply by taking a 40-year-old album as your starting point.
You could do that if you were good, anyway, and Home Front are really fucking good. The first time I heard Games Of Power, I thought it was a fun, novel conceptual thing, a chocolate-in-peanut-butter experiment with promising results. But then I just kept coming back to the record, over and over. Games Of Power is more than the sum of its parts. It’s bigger and meaner and more urgent. It’s a joyously ferocious album, made with a sense of gleeful discovery. In it, I heard the joyous energy of two not-young guys realizing that they were making something amazing together. MacKinnon and Frazier put together a live band, and when I saw them later in 2023, they put on an absolute beast of a show, their joyous energy upstaging everyone on a truly great punk bill. They’ve carried that swagger through to their sophomore album Watch It Die, which is bigger and brighter and meaner than the last one.
Even though Home Front now operate as a deadly five-piece live band, Graeme MacKinnon and Clint Frazier still work as a duo in the studio. On Watch It Die, they get some help. Frazier’s old Shout Out Out Out Out bandmate Nik Kozub produced the LP, and he did some of the synths and sampling. Jonah Falco once again did some production and some extra instrumentation, too. Mostly, though, it’s a two-man machine. MacKinnon sings and plays bass and guitar. Frazier does keyboards, drums, and drum machines. In a band that’s split pretty evenly between the organic and the electronic, that division of labor makes complete sense. The guitars bring out the best in the synths and vice versa.
Part of the joy of the first Home Front album was how new and fresh and novel it all sounded. On Watch It Die, things are a little different. At this point, these guys know what they can do, and they’re eager to show it off. There’s a swagger to this record that wasn’t there before. Sometimes, the songs almost work as pop. The single “Eulogy” has a hands-outstretched grandeur that I almost never hear from a punk band that still operates on a DIY level. If you squint your ears hard enough, that version of Home Front could almost be one of the more radio-friendly bands to come out of the mid-’00s dance-punk moment. I didn’t necessarily want to hear a Home Front track that reminds me of the Bravery, but they make that shit sound as urgent and exciting as everything else that they’ve done.
But there’s another side to that equation. The harder songs on Watch It Die are harder than anything on Games Of Power. “New Madness” is a hammering, robotic industrial rager about living in a new era of robotic fascism. “For The Children (Fuck All)” and “Young Offender” are singalong anthems about resisting the rich people and cops who want to grind you into dirt. “Always This Way” is a rock ‘n’ roll stomp-around about how rich people and cops have wanted to grind you into the dirt since the moment that rich people and cops were invented: “While we kick rocks, they launch rockets to space! And you ask yourself, why is it always this way?”
You might’ve noticed a lyrical theme emerging. Most Home Front songs are about pushing back against a parasytic system that steals your time and energy and labor — about class solidarity not as some lofty ideal but as a necessity for survival in the face of “a future so out of reach.” That feeling shines through even when they’re at their most sentimental. “The Vanishing” is a fond Springsteenian reverie about wayward punk youth: “Packed in the Pontiac Acadian, it’s just bodies and music, ducking down when the lights of the squad car drives by.” But even there, the pervading melancholy doesn’t just come from the passage of time or the friends you’ve lost along the way. It’s in how the rigors of adult life prevent you from having that kind of experience ever again: “The nation owes me a living, and I’m tired of watching time waste away.”
On that song, Graeme MacKinnon sings about working Monday to Friday. I don’t know the day-job situation of the guys in Home Front, but theirs is not the tour schedule of a full-time band. Watch It Die is just slightly more polished than Games Of Power, but this is still raw, scrappy triumph-of-the-underdog music. MacKinnon doesn’t sing like a professional, and he makes up for any lack of melodic nuance with the charismatic force of his bellow. He sounds like a good friend, yelling to you so that you can hear him over the really loud, really great music playing in the bar. That music swells and glimmers and glows, and I never lose the sense that I’m hearing people who do this for the love.
Some of the songs on Watch It Die are big. “Between The Times” sounds like Vince Clarke-era Depeche Mode if the band was made up entirely of soccer hooligans. The epic album-closer “Empire” could be a Giorgio Moroder remix of a Gaslight Anthem power ballad. If you’re making a movie and there’s a shootout scene in a goth club, then you really need to set that scene to “Kiss The Sky.” But even at its grandest, Watch It Die is a DIY punk rock album with a hard, scrappy core. It builds on what Home Front did with Games Of Power, and it never sacrifices that record’s primal power.
Graeme MacKinnon and Clint Frazier already made their breakthrough discovery. Now, they’re learning all kinds of new things that they can do with their rediscovered invention. It’s inspiring to hear them work it out in real time, and it’s exciting to imagine where they could go from here.
Watch It Die is out 11/14 via La Vida Es Un Mus Discos.
Other albums of note out this week:
• FKA twigs’ EUSEXUA Afterglow
• Ragana & Drowse’s Ash Souvenir
• Austra’s Chin Up Buttercup
• Tony Molina’s On This Day
• Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin’s Stygian Bough: Vol II
• Raw Brigade’s 100%
• Sword II’s Electric Hour
• Summer Walker’s Finally Over It
• Madi Diaz’s Enema Of The Garden State
• The Avett Brothers & Mike Patton’s AVTT/PTTN
• Navy Blue’s The Sword & The Soaring
• Boldy James & Nicholas Craven’s Criminally Attached
• Real Bad Man & TOBi’s The Perfect Blue
• Valee & MVW’s WHERE WERE WE
• Torture’s War Crime 2: Genocide Protocol
• BICEP’s CHROMA 000
• RZA’s Bobby Digital Presents: Juice Crew All Stars
• Jim Jarmusch & Anika’s Father Mother Sister Brother Soundtrack
• Jake Xerxes Fussell & James Elkington’s Rebuilding Score
• Blondshell’s Another Picture
• Lamp Of Murmuur’s The Dreaming Prince In Ecstasy
• Egyptrixx’s How Tidal
• Odonis Odonis’ Odonis Odonis
• VoidCeremony’s Abditum
• Onyon’s Pale Horses
• Nightmares On Wax’s Echo45 Sound System
• Matt Pryor’s The Salton Sea
• The Mary Onettes’ SWORN
• Colter Wall’s Memories And Empties
• Don West’s Give Me All Your Love
• Wale’s Everything Is A Lot
• Tiberius’ Troubadour
• Of Mice & Men’s Another Miracle
• PRYVT’s Back To Reality
• False Reality’s Faded Intentions
• AnAkA’s Crisis Of The Concrete
• Zola Mennenöh’s A Labour Of Love
• Runo’s patching
• Glaxo Babies’ Men Of Stone
• Ben Quad’s Wisher
• JJJJJerome’s Vesper Sparrow
• Ale Hop’s A Body Like A Home
• Kalia Vandever’s Another View
• Hélène Barbier’s Panorama
• Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske’s At Source
• Theo Croker & Sullivan Fortner’s Play
• Star Card’s Trash World
• Kalia Vandever’s Another View
• AVRALIZE’s liminal
• Lawrence Hart’s Asking For A Friend
• Picture Parlour’s The Parlour
• PREYRS’ The Wounded Healer
• Azam Ali’s Synesthesia
• Hyloxolos’ Hyloxolos
• John-Robert’s Cross Stitch
• Touching Ice’s I Just Remembered Everything Always Works Out For Me
• Stargazers’ Stargazers
• NAVA’s GABBEH
• Jordan Ward’s BACKWARD
• Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi’s Undertow
• Liz Hogg’s Goodbye World Hello Something
• Shoko Nagai’s Forbidden Flowers
• Ruby Colley’s Hello Halo
• Andy James’ THE ARCHITECT OF MY BLUES
• Jasdeep Singh Degun’s Jogkauns
• Lia Kohl’s Various Small Whistles And A Song
• Cytrus’ Duality
• Marauder’s Flaschenträger
• Ren Martinez’s Fingers Crossed
• Ramonda Hammer’s Wake Up, Play Nice
• Alto Aria’s Ephemeral
• Ashley Cooke’s Ace
• Mina Tindle’s Compass Rosa
• Lithe’s Euphoria
• Brinsley Schwarz’s Shouting At The Moon
• FearDorian & osquinn’s Before You Press Play
• f5ve’s SEQUENCE 01.5
• Nobu Woods’ CHIMERA mixtape
• Men Without Hats’ Men Without Hats On The Moon
• 5 Seconds Of Summer’s Everyone’s A Star!
• The Neighbourhood’s (((((ultraSOUND)))))
• The Devil Wears Prada’s Flowers
• The Rolling Stones’ Black And Blue super deluxe box set
• The Black Crowes’ Amorica 30th anniversary box set
• Split Enz’s ENZyclopedia Volumes One & Two box set
• Mötley Crüe’s Theatre Of Pain 40th anniversary box set
• Tears For Fears’ Songs From The Big Chair (40th Anniversary Edition)
• Drive-By Truckers’ The Definitive Decoration Day
• Green Day’s Warning (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
• Lush’s Gala (35th Anniversary Edition)
• Collabs 3000’s Metalism (20th Anniversary Edition)
• Everything But The Girl’s The Best Of Everything But The Girl
• Doves’ So, Here We Are: Best Of Doves
• Blackberry Smoke’s Rattle, Ramble & Roll: The Best of Blackberry Smoke – Volume One
• Sponge’s Electric Cattle Gods – The Lost Tracks
• Josh Groban’s Hidden Gems
• Leila’s Courtesy Of Choice… Asides And Besides
• Ima Robot’s Search And Destroy
• Samia’s Bloodless Tour – Live From First Avenue
• Bill Orcutt’s Another Perfect Day live album
• Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones’ Live In Vilnius
• Stare Kits’ Live In NYC 1979
• Momma’s My Blue Sky (Deluxe Edition)/
• caroline’s caroline 2 (deluxe)
• Yves Jarvis’ All Cylinders (Deluxe)
• Patrick Davis’ Carolina When I Die (Deluxe Edition)
• Girls Aloud’s Christmas ‘Round At Ours (Deluxe)
• Various Artists’ A Very Awesome Yo Gabba Gabba! Christmas!
• Jimmy Eat World’s Something(s) Loud EP
• No Idols’ No Idols EP
• Orville Peck’s Appaloosa EP
• ira glass’ joy is no knocking nation EP
• Surf Gang & Lerado Khalil’s Scenic Route EP
• Lewis Capaldi’s Survive EP
• Rise Carmine’s Come In Closer EP
• Lips Of Strangers’ Too Long For Lovers EP
• Manuka Honey’s Road Rage EP
• Sofie Alise’s Break From The Bends EP
• OSLO’s The Great Divide EP
• Impérieux’s In And Out EP
• Asha Banks’ How Real Was It? EP
• Via’s Via EP
• Primordial Rites’ Contemplation Scriptures & The Swallowing Void EP
• Matt Hitt’s You’ll Be Lucky EP
• B.U.G Antman’s Y’all 2 Ugly EP
• NF’s FEAR EP
• Gabriel Jacoby’s gutta child EP
