Interview With: Home Counties

Are You Listening? hits the best venues Reading has to offer this weekend! Taking place on Saturday 11^th May 2024, it features an incredible lineup of crucial alternative artists including headliners Antony Szmierek and The Mysterines. They top a bill featuring such vital acts as C Duncan, Fat Dog, Heartworms, Home Counties, Hot Wax and many more bands you need to know.

The excitement kicks off at Saint Laurence Church with the Are You Listening? Warm Up on Friday 10^th May 2024 featuring Opus Kink, Chalk, Midnight Rodeo and Horse Rock.

CLICK HERE to book Are You Listening? tickets.

Gigantic Tickets spoke to synth-orientated post-punks Home Counties ahead of their appearance at Are You Listening? to discover what the Bristolian band about their influences and what to expect from their set at the coming festival.

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Home Counties meld post-punk with art-pop, and you seemingly nod to DEVO, Orange Juice, and Squid. Who would you say your influences are? 

Recently we started listening to artists like LCD Sound System, Confidence Man and Daft Punk and wanted to incorporate their more dancey and electronic vibe into the sound we’ve established with our previous releases. We’ve also been listening to a lot of 2000s bangers, so wanted to steal some pop production elements like autotune which feature prominently in the title track of our album Exactly As It Seems.

You’ve just dropped the brand-new title track single “Exactly As It Seems” which seems like a swipe at corporate culture and glamorising the grind. What more can you tell us about the song?

Lyrically the song plays on a lot of themes that feature in the wider album like struggling through mundane office work and aspiring to be aspirational. The song actually began as a Slipknot rip off after we discovered the lyrics to “Psychosocial” magically fit perfectly during a writing session. We have loved that song for years and use it to rudely awaken each other by rolling a Bluetooth speaker into the room with it on full blast. Will’s girlfriend still hasn’t really forgiven me. 

“Exactly As It Seems” features on your debut album Exactly As It Seems which came out earlier this year. What’s been the response to your first full-length record?

So far really positive, we’ve had great support from the radio like Emily Pilbeam on BBC Radio 6 and John Kennedy on Radio X, and we’ve had some great press reviews too (except this one French review that said it was evil and that we have silly English faces). More importantly, people at shows and listeners seemed to really like it, and the album songs now go down the best live which is really reaffirming.

It’s been a long time coming, having been playing together in various guises for ten years now. How does it feel having worked so hard and for so long to start attracting such widespread attention?

Very flattering to be honest. Although we’ve been at this a while, we all still love doing it and are really thankful to everyone who’s been listening and supporting the band along the way. We feel very grateful that we get to jump in a van with our best mates, drive to a city we’ve never been to and there’s a crowd of people there who want to see us play.

Bristol is famed for its vibrant music scene. Are there any other rising stars or breakthrough bands from there we should know about? 

It’s been a while since we’ve lived in Bristol now, having moved to London a couple years back, but we miss it dearly. Towards the end of us living there, we were loving Lice and Bingo Fury. More recently coming out of Bristol. Bingo Fury’s album which came out this in February is really beautiful. We’ve also been loving Get Down Services recently and can’t wait to finally catch them live.

You’ve got a prominent slot at Are You Listening? What can we expect from your performance at the awesome Reading-based festival?

We always try to make our live sets as fun as possible we really try and bring the party. For this tour, our drummer Dan has also made some amazing audio-reactive visuals which we think will really bring a new dimension to it all. 

And what else does 2024 have in store for Home Counties?

We start our tour with Tatyana today (at the time of writing this) which is going to be awesome. We have a few festival slots over summer and are going to head back to Amsterdam next month. We also may or may not be back in the studio at some point to record some more. 

📆 Tour Dates:

• 10^th May 2024: Are You Listening? Warm Up - Saint Laurence Church, Reading
• 11^th May 2024: Are You Listening? Festival - Various Venues in Reading

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