2025 has been a busy year for Home Counties, and 2026 is shaping up to be, if anything, even more intense. The past year saw a busy festival season for the now London-based six-piece, who grabbed the occasion to deliver their heady mix of post-punk and synth hooks to British and European crowds prior to the release of their well-received second album ‘Humdrum’, capping it all up with a sold-out headline show at Scala. Sky is clearly the limit as the band now embarks on even more ambitious projects: in the cards for 2026, thus far, is a headline slot at CloseUp Festival and supporting rock behemoths Franz Ferdinand on tour.
“It’s an insane privilege to get this one so suddenly”, vocalist Will Harrison points out about the latter. “It will be the first support tour we’ve done in about four years. People don’t really talk about it, but it’s actually hard to get support slots; it’s very competitive. We’ve been trying to get on supports because that’s how you grow, rather than headlining all the time. We’d met Alex from Franz Ferdinand at one of our gigs in London, and then talked to him at a few festivals that we were doing together, and he’d sort of mentioned it, but we really didn’t think it would come to anything. So to be actually asked to do it was like, what the fuck”. They’re heading straight to Texas after the final show of that tour, too, to take part in SXSW. “It’s going to be the best month of our lives”.
“Our tours tend to get a bit messy, so we are trying to be sensible,” quips Barn Peiser Pepin, who is responsible for many of the moving parts of the band’s sound, from synths to percussion. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of this, they have plenty of good live show memories to reminisce about. “Playing Transmusicales in France, that was just remarkable. We honestly did not know it existed before, and then we rocked up at around three in the morning and played to four thousand people. Then the night after, we were in a tiny little bar in Brittany. It was so cool. Equally fun, but such polar opposite gigs”. Another time, they drove fourteen hours to play a festival in Switzerland: “We’d brought Dan [Hearns]’s granddad with us, and he stayed out until six AM. It was the rainiest, muddiest festival ever. We thought he was going to die there on stage with us”.
Before the prestigious support slots and crazy festival life, the band’s roots go back to Buckinghamshire, and then Bristol - hence the name. “We are all from near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, that’s where we met, that’s where we went to school. We only picked the name when we were in Bristol, and it’s a bit strange now that we’re in London,” Peiser Pepin points out. “It feels less detached. It used to be an ironic nod, but now it feels like we’re trying to be more transparent about who we are as musicians”. All in all, they are happy with the choice: “The other name we were going to go with, at one point, was New Labour,” Harrison grins. “With a NU, like Nu metal. Or a NEU, like the Krautrock band. We’re glad we didn’t go with that”.
As for the original roots of their pull to make music, they credit their families for moving to the area where they all met, and then New York’s Parquet Courts. “Andrew Savage has a lot to answer for,” Harrison laughs. “Everything’s been modelled after that kind of music, discordant and angular, and we’ve been finding our way in and out of that ever since,” Peiser Pepin adds.
It has resulted in an interesting push-and-pull between the band’s two spirits, one tied to the sharp-edged vibes of post-punk, the other engaged in an ongoing fascination with highly danceable synth-rock. “What we realised is, what makes Home Counties is this synthesis between art rock, punk, and the dance element,” Harrison concludes. “We are not letting that go. It was never like, let’s make a dance record. We also have a tendency to think stuff we make is really poppy, when actually it’s not. It’s just poppy by the standards of a band that’s really dissonant. We think it’s easy listening, but we’ve sort of conditioned our brains with a base level that’s pretty wonky, to the point that we’re a bit numb to it.”
Many of these considerations went into the making of their most recent record, ‘Humdrum’, produced by Al Doyle and released on Submarine Cat. “Having an external producer come in to mix was a first for us,” Peiser Pepin points out. “We’d worked with people in the mixing stage, never on the writing and compositional side of things. It helped us get through the teething problems which had taken us months on the first record. Sometimes you need that third party to come in and settle the debate, take your hands out of it”.
What would they like to do now, moving forward, with so much already on their plate? “We want to do more of actually playing the music live before recording it properly,” Harrison says. “We’ve been making it like producers. We’re all into music production, and we will sit around a laptop and argue about the sound of the kick drum, that sort of stuff.” Peiser Pepin agrees: “Often we end up going back to the record as well when we have problems, because sometimes it’s hard to translate synth or electronic bases. Sometimes we flip it up, and things morph, and with older songs, get different changes over time, which you end up preferring. Sometimes they change to the point that we start wishing we’d recorded them differently, which is why we’re thinking of switching up our approach a bit now”.
With the band looking to the stage more than the studio, then, there is no better moment to head to a Home Counties show - and perhaps catch a glimpse of the band’s future as it takes shape.
Strazulla Chiara Strazzulla
@cstrazzull
Image: Luca Bailey
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