Album Review: Watch It Die by Home Front

"In this time of madness / How does this beauty survive?" Graeme MacKinnon shouts on the album's soaring title track. The answer, it seems, is to cram into a studio with your best friends and crank up your instruments until they're about to give way. It's a formula that MacKinnon (vocals, guitar and bass) and his bandmate Clint Frazier (synths, key, drums and programming) first explored on Home Front's acclaimed 2023 debut, Games of Power, merging elements of post-punk, new wave and industrial rock into what they call "bootwave": a gritty subgenre evoking the cadence of heavy boots stomping on frozen concrete; of crunching through a layer of snow, toes nearly frozen.

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Home Front is even more Home Front-y than they were before and that's a good thing. The genius of Home Front's initial genesis was the combination of stomping oi! with the lesser celebrated side of '80s alt. There's a little bit more Tears for Fears here than there is Bauhaus or Joy Division- though JD, or maybe New Order, does make its appearance known. On Watch It Die the band keeps their boot boy thwomp but leans more into the huge melancholy heard on songs from the big chair and welcome to the pleasure dome.

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