Tracking from rural to urban since their formation five years ago, the East London-via-Buckinghamshire six-piece intersect space and time in equal sonic measure. Their first two EPs came leaning on the skewiff yet nimble post-punk footwork of acts such as Yard Act and Squid to evermore synth scored dabbling that has seen the band flaunt twitchy electronic segues adjacent to straight-up indie-pop panache.
Finding voice through dual vocalists Will Harrison and Lois Kelly, Humdrum pins its focus on the curios of communication. It's a record that converses in its own lexicon of decade-merging dialogue whilst at its core referencing mid-2020s social paraphernalia via the band’s familiar lyrical wisecracking. With a history of support slots for the likes of Pip Blom and Sports Team, Home Counties continue to garner credit as modern indie staples unafraid to toy and experiment with genres in a playful rather than conceited fashion, an openness that only seems to bolster the outfit’s evolving stylistic impulses.
Al Doyle, of LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip fame, lends input in producing a sophomore album confidently harnessing the late-noughties dance punk heyday as its axis, an influence nudgingly the case for their first full-length record but on more committed display here. Metronomy and early Foals figure as points of reference for the Moog-daubed “Take You Back” fading into a glitch-spliced title-track, beautifully chaotic in its mashup of squiggly strings and synths emulating a Gameboy giving up the ghost; whilst shades of Depeche Mode ring deceptively through the intro to “Spain” before giving way to more conventional indie turns.
The droll architecture of “Meet Me in the Flat Roof” sees bubbling synth paired with conversational sparring on jaded pub haunts: “Can’t believe you’ve not been here before / I’ve been drinking here since 84 / Bet where you go usually’s a bore / Wouldn’t catch me dead there anymore.” A track written during the band’s early days, “Cheeseball” stands as an irresistibly infectious highlight, a certified earworm that indulges in pure 80s new wave technopop, as if Human League and OMD were to collide with a sea of neon bubblegum; “Like That” serves a closing commentary on the class system alongside a dose of late-90s indie electronica, á la Under the Western Freeway-era Grandaddy.
Home Counties, if in any doubt, prove dab hands at gelling their influences – both disparate and far removed – into functional disarray with Humdrum; nonchalantly swerving through backdrops and fixtures of modern life with a devil-may-care angularity that seals the band’s reputation for avant indie pop wrought with heart, intelligence and comfort-zone defying edge.
