Home Counties - 'You Break It, You Bought It'
Indie/electronic dance six-piece party bring all-too-relatable quips about modern city life in new number, You Break It, You Bought it. It Comes ahead of their scheduled debut later this year in May.
It's a relief to know that the oddity of new wave emerging out of punk back in the late '70s was not lost to our future generations of musicians. Featuring a bizarre arrangement of weird and wonderful noises, Home Counties certainly know no bounds to the industrial genre. Now, spruced up with a name of its own - crank wave - the band join a whole plethora of individualists broadening the scope of punk.Drawing zesty imaginings from the likes of Gang of Four and awkward dance-pop inflections from Devo, the set of six are on the precipice to becoming one of the hottest new indie electronic/dance acts this year. Having released their EP debut of In a Middle English Town at the start of 2022, their music started to ignite with Back to The 70s - a sharp-witted outlook on the collapse of a faulty economy wrapped with guitar zingers and madcap synth racket. Now, the group have upped the ante with You Break It, You Bought It. A spacious, funky art-bop taking catchy stylings from Australian pop-duo Confidence Man, it keens into high-margin rent figures and dodgy landlords that seeps into the mundanity of life, all the while pointing out a much larger societal issue at play. Financial greed. Kelly and Harrison dart back and forth in a petty fashion: "as I'm standing here, and I've realised i've been cleaning the skirting boards for over an hour now. But I won't have it, I simply won't take it. You bought it and I'll break it. I'll burn it, I'll leave the oven on, I'll burn it all down." This single follows Wild Guess, a waiting room art-rock offload to social isolation, and Uptight, a shifted indie-disco dance-floor norm which ironically, plays into not having the urge to go clubbing anymore. The theme of a topsy-turvy London life to the dissatisfied youth runs riot throughout the debut; gleaming playfully in one corner and writhing uncontrollably in the next. Drawing a whole host of nuances from age-old to the contemporary, Exactly As It Seems is a fun, breezy outlook an otherwise desperate state of affairs for a down-trodden country. Heaped with lyrical sardonicism and fizzy synth beep-boops, it can be shoehorned into the berserk dance-punk genre but can be sandwiched into any bracket going. "Hey look! Everything sucks but we're having fun doing it!"You can catch them on their upcoming tour in May starting in Manchester's YES on the 7th and ending at Dot to Dot Festival in Nottingham on the 26th. Exactly As It Seems releases on the 3rd of May.
Words by Alex Curle
