Home Front: “We want every album to be like going into a record store and checking out all the different sections”

“What would ultimate success look like for Home Front?” Graeme MacKinnon ponders towards the end of a freewheeling chat about music, politics and the existential dread of being alive in 2026.

“Personally, one goal I’ve always harboured is to sell enough merch that a portion of it gets lost or donated and ends up going to small villages in Africa where some random kids could pick it up and put it on. Like when you see photos of people in those faraway places wearing, like, Toronto Blue Jays World Series shirts from 1992. If that could happen with my band, it’d be cool as fuck!”

As rock star ambitions go, it’s straight out of leftfield. But that’s on-brand for one of the most mercurial new outfits in alternative music. Meeting us in his home “bunker” after an early-early shift as the Control Room Director at a local TV station’s Morning Show (“Everything’s automated now… I loved back when I was just rockin’ the faders!”) Graeme has the look of a shut-in survivalist. But rarely has a band been quite so wired-in to the music and wider world around them.

“People tend to get into our band through whichever one specific song connects with them,” Graeme goes on. “One song might sound like straight Oi! with synths. Another could be like Joy Division or The Damned, Suicide or early Misfits. People have so many very different ways into the music. But nobody really knows what they’re getting into until they’ve peeled back that first layer. We’re kind of an Oi! punk band. We’re a little bit synthpop. So we just call it ‘bootwave’…”

Arriving in the wake of Graeme’s old punk outfit Wednesday Night Heroes and that of his primary bandmate Clint Frazier, dance-punk collective Shout Out Out Out, Home Front has previously been characterised as a vision quest following the spirit guides of their eclectic record collections. After intriguing EP Think Of The Lie, full-length 2023 debut Games Of Power felt like a polished prototype: all pointy edges and deep shadow. Last year’s Watch It Die was even more dynamic.

“We want each album to be like going into a record store and checking out all the different sections,” Graeme nods. “You know the punk is over here, and some guys might know where the metal is, but sometimes you need to go into the electronic section to get something just as heavy.”

Thanks to the closed doors of COVID, the band hadn’t even performed live when they released their first LP. On one level, that was useful, allowing Graeme and Clint to emphasise their own idiosyncrasies without being caught up in outside trends. But the subtler, more textural Home Front on record is very much the Dr Jekyll to their raucous live band’s Mr Hyde. And their ambition and range has exponentially exploded after seeing what happens when they unleash the beast.

“Really, there are two versions of Home Front,” Graeme grins. “In the studio, making records, it’s just me and Clint. He does all the synths and drum machines. I do all the guitar, bass and vocals. Sometimes we’ll be making stripped-down, Wax Trax! style industrial like early Ministry, Front 242 or Nitzer Ebb. Sometimes it’s closer to straight punk with synths on top. But live, we have a band playing over the top of everything. We’ll even have a drummer playing over our drum machines. There’s far more sound and energy. We’re way more aggressive, way more in your face. We played a show at the weekend with all these young straight-edge hardcore skinheads stage-diving to every song. We were like, ‘Okay, that’s just how they react to it!’ But I especially love it when people don’t know exactly what they’re watching. When those people let go, that’s when shit pops off!”

Driven by their love and knowledge of music as Home Front are – Graeme namechecks about a band a minute during our three-quarters-of-an-hour together – the fuel for Watch It Die’s fire came from personal experience: the pain of losing friends and family as the world burned around them.

“Losing people while the world is falling apart hits you in such an intense way,” the singer rubs his brow. “The impact is so much bigger. We lost people that were close to us during the making of this record. I lost my father. We lost some very close friends. On top of that, we were seeing people we loved being arrested just for protesting and all the broader turmoil. It leads to grief, anxiety and depression. We called the album Watch It Die because we saw a whole way of life dying…

“That reflected right back in our songwriting. Like, when we made Eulogy we started out just to write something that repeats with a simple chord progression, then builds. But once I started putting words down to the music I found myself thinking of my father and friends who had passed. There were wildfires in Canada at the time, too. The sky was filled with so much smoke that the sun was a different colour. It felt like the end of days. The first lyric jumped onto the page: ‘I’m not afraid to die / It’s the living part that’s hard’. Then all the loss and uncertainty poured out of me...”

It's hard to argue that things are getting better. As a proudly political Canadian band, Home Front are as aware as anyone of the shitshow happening just across their southern border. One upside is that draconian limitations on touring bands has meant a consolidation of the Canadian scene, with young acts like Béton Armé and Puffer from Montreal, and Vancouver’s Bootlicker feeding into a Canadian punk identity that’s separate from the increasingly homogenised North American sound. Beyond that, however, fascism and far-right ideologies need to be fought on the harshest terms.

“Home Front has always been a reaction to our right-wing governments,” Graeme references the current United Conservative Party (UCP) leadership in his home state of Alberta. “They’re trying to privatise education and healthcare. They’re anti-trans. These are all things our band has spoken out against. Of course, it’s not just us. It’s happening on a massive scale in the United States. Israel is committing a genocide and getting away with it. These are things that everyone sees. Ultimately, this music is about channelling all that anger and shock, sadness and depression into something. It’s about taking all the fingers on the hand, uniting them as a fist – then punching through walls.”

The dark, pulsating, defiantly listenable post-punk beat of songs like Light Sleeper (‘We’re born alone / We die alone’), New Madness and Light Sleeper might not feel like the obvious soundtrack for rabble rousing. But acknowledging the dark place we’re in is integral to getting out of it.

“Is this a hopeful album?” Graeme reflects. “It’s hopeful in the sense that we’re trying to focus on smaller tangibles that we can affect. Metal. Punk. The underground in general. Our community. The guy down the street. Voting in someone else isn’t going to immediately make it better. The things that control our society and the powers that be aren’t structures that you or I can pull down. So instead of focusing on the big shit, let’s get back to things closer to home and what we can change with our two hands. Who can we help? Who can we uplift? Who can we grieve with? When you zoom out and see everything going on in the world – Sudan, the Congo, Gaza – it’s like, ‘Fucking hell, how is this ever going to get better?!’ But when you zoom in, it can give you hope.”

More than just hope, going back to grassroots provides the building blocks for a brighter future.

“I like the metaphor of how every flower was born from mud but still became something beautiful,” Graeme signs off. “Eventually, they withered and died away, too. But they left behind seeds beneath the earth: another generation waiting to grow up in their place. If we can influence some young kids to experiment with different ideas, different sounds and different ways of approaching punk music, I would be so happy. The next generation has an uphill battle, with so many obstacles laid out in front of them, but then you see acts like Kneecap who are finding success in expressing discontent with a sense of hope; bringing the politics and the party. Because even as one generation dies, there’ll be another waiting to carry the torch and inherit the earth.”

Watch It Die is out now via La Vida Es Un Mus Discos. Home Front will play London’s The Lexington on February 8.

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