Interview
The Home Team: “We don’t take ourselves too seriously”
Brian Butcher talks The Crucible Of Life and the importance of taking things personally
For lot of people, Seattle’s The Home Team may seem like a new name on the scene.
Pioneers of a style they like to call ‘heavy pop’, they’ve had a huge couple of years sharing the stage with the likes of The Used, Don Broco, and Senses Fail. With the summer release of their triumphant third full-length The Crucible Of Lifeturning plenty of heads in their direction, it may come as a surprise to learn that the band recently celebrated their 10-year anniversary.
Starting out on the local DIY circuit and booking their own tours for years, it’s been a long journey for The Home Team to get to where they are now. Blending their pop-punk and metal backgrounds with R&B, funk, and pop influences, they’ve developed a reputation for creative authenticity, forging a dedicated and passionate fanbase drawn to their originality.
Trusting their gut and following their tastes, even when no one else in the industry had their backs, the quartet are now ready to reap the rewards of their decade-long grind. Set to head out on their first ever UK headline tour in December, we spoke to vocalist Brian Butcher about being yourself, finding your sound, and how grinding it out in the DIY scene has kept them humble.
A lot has changed since you released your 2021 album Slow Bloom, and there a lot of differences between that record and the band we hear on The Crucible Of Life. When did the foundations for this latest album begin being laid?
We started writing bits and pieces of The Crucible Of Life not too long after Slow Bloom was done. However, we got so busy that it took a while for us to really get the ball rolling on it. We ended up signing with a new label, Thriller Records, and they’ve been fantastic. When we were talking about this next album, they asked if we were open to doing it their way. They’ve brought bands up to work with co-writers that they see a lot of fruit from, so we agreed. We went down to LA to do a bunch of writing sessions with people, and some were great, some were not so great. It ended up taking a little bit longer than we anticipated, just because we were trying new things, and we were also touring. COVID had finally been lifted, and we wanted to get out there as much as possible. I’m glad that the album creation process went the way that it did though, because we’ve learned so much about ourselves as musicians. Learning what we don’t like as well as what we do has been so important, especially as things get busier and busier. That’s essentially what the whole idea behind The Crucible Of Life is. We thought we were out of the chaos once the DIY days were over, but we were so wrong!
There’s a little bit of everything within these songs, from the obvious pop-punk and metal influences to the likes of R&B, pop, and funk. How did you go about evolving your signature ‘heavy pop’ sound with these songs?
Coming out of Slow Bloom, we knew what we were looking for in our sound. On that album, we found our sound, and we were exploring it all throughout those tracks. This new album was a chance to hone it. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t think we even got to do all the honing we wanted to do, because the writing process was a little sporadic. That makes me so excited for the next record, even though we’re still talking about this one! Having said that, The Crucible Of Life was a chance for further exploration of our sound. Songs like ‘Loud’ do a great job of boiling down what we’ve been trying to do into a more concise vision, but it was hard to squeeze that sound as much as we wanted to. I think that’ll be a good thing in the long run. It’s allowing us to find new things that we like in this world of ‘heavy pop’ that we’ve been exploring. I don’t think our vision was very concise going into it, but it’s a lot more concise coming out of it.
More than anything, The Crucible Of Life is such a fun album. With the world being as chaotic as it is right now, that spirit feels more important than ever…
Honestly, I think it comes down to an expression of who we are as people. When you talk to any of us, it’s clear that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re so easy-going, and I think that naturally is going to come out in the music. It’s especially clear in our music videos, because that process is a little more collaborative. We’re able to throw ideas at the wall and talk through them. Music is collaborative too, but we each have our own little thing to offer because we all play our own respective instruments. Lyrically, for example, I don’t write about silly stuff that often. However, it’s obvious that we have a fun demeanour. We’re fun guys to be around, and it’s important to have that aspect in our music. I’ve seen a lot of bands who behave so differently than their music suggests, and it makes you wonder if that’s the music they want to make, or if they’re just making it to pay the bills. There’s nothing wrong with that, and everybody’s just trying to find their sound, but we’ve always had a strong sense of being who we are in our art.
When you were younger, did you often find yourself drawn to artists who were unafraid to let their music reflect their personality?
One of the bands that comes to mind is A Day To Remember. When I was younger, I remember seeing them as real people a lot easier because they were so individualistic. I remember reading an interview with Jeremy [McKinnon, vocalist] when I was in high school, and he made a point to say that they don’t listen to a lot of bands in their genre because they don’t want to sound like them. That stuck with me, because I was like, ‘What do you mean? You don’t listen to bands in your genre? That makes no sense?’ After that, I was reading an interview with Levi Benton from Miss May I, and he said something similar. He said that he listens mostly to R’n’B, and I was baffled, but now I’m 29 I’m in the exact same position. I want to be an individual in this world, and I don’t want to replicate what the people around me are doing. I don’t know how much it affected my outlook on their music, but it made it easier for me to dive into the universe of bands. I liked following them because they were individuals, and I could see that uniqueness. I think that having that spirit gives us an advantage, maybe not so much in the music, but with people being able to see us as people.
How important has cutting your teeth on the DIY touring circuit, and the mentality those experiences instilled, been on The Home Team becoming the band they are today?
We did five or six years of DIY touring, and the best part of it was that we got to suck in front of nobody. When we toured with Real Friends, we had this conversation with them. Their first EP blew up, and their first tour was supporting a big band in the scene. They sucked in front of 1000s of people, and they told us how embarrassing it was. Doing what we did, we sucked in front of nobody. We got to trudge through the mud for five years, working out what we were doing, figuring out our sound, and developing our endurance. As much as we’re a little soured by how much time we spent in the DIY scene, we’re very grateful. Not every band gets the opportunities that we’ve been getting recently, and once we got here, we were already dialled in. The first real support tour we ever did was with This Wild Life in 2022, and we had played over 200 shows as a band by then. We knew exactly what we were doing, and that’s the number one thing I’m grateful for. Our live performance is so much better now because of how much time we spent as a DIY band.
You’ve been out on the road a lot over the past couple of years. How has it been to see how people have connected to your songs and found their own sense of community through this band?
There are a couple of different things that come to mind when I think of the community and connection of The Home Team. One of them is the band’s Discord, because I’ve seen people make best friends there. Recently, I also noticed a Subreddit pop up about us, which is crazy because I grew up using Reddit. Nothing compares to seeing people at the shows though, and it’s been exceptional because I never considered that aspect of it. When I was growing up, thinking about my goals of trying to be a musician, I didn’t consider the potential to form a community. Now though, that is one of the coolest aspects of doing this. Seeing people meet each other through a mutual love of our band is crazy, and it’s an honour to sit and watch that flourish.
You’ve got your first ever UK headline shows coming up in December. Did you ever expect this project to be selling out shows so far away from home?
I don’t really know what I expected, but I’ve always had the delusion that things were going to work out. I had no real reason to believe that would be the case, but the whole tour sold out in two weeks. The rooms aren’t huge, but I don’t think any of us anticipated it happening quite that fast because it’s across the world. Having said that, touring with The Used in the UK was so tight. We finally got to meet some of the fans that have been listening to us over there for five years, and I attribute a lot of the success of the headline tour to that support slot. We played in front of a lot of people, and I’m grateful for that opportunity. It helped us make some new fans, and now they have bought tickets to see us again. That’s the whole point of opening for other bands, and it’s a chance to convert a portion of their fans to your fans. I’m very excited to go back because I enjoyed my time over the UK a lot.
The live show is where the ethos of this band truly comes to life. When you’re working on music in the studio, how much thought goes into how the songs will work within your live show?
Not much, however, one thing that I’ve had to consider is singing it. If it’s impossible to sing a note live, I’m going to have a bad time. We’ve never shifted the key of anything to be lower, which a lot of bands do if it’s difficult for the singer. I probably should have done that for ‘Overtime’, but I’m glad I didn’t. If anything, that’s made me a better singer over the years. It’s challenging to write songs that are too hard for me to sing live, and then having to figure it out later. I’ve always had the mentality of, ‘I’m not going to make a song worse just so that I can sing it live’. I would rather figure it out. Obviously, that’s within reason, and I’m not going to throw a bunch of insane high notes in if I can’t realistically do it! ‘Overtime’ is the hardest in the set right now, and I gave a couple of parts to Ryne [Olson, bass] so that I can take a deep breath. There are a couple of parts in the track too, but I sing all the important parts. That’s just the way it should be, because I’m the singer! Other than my vocals though, honestly, we never really consider how a song is going to go off live. I can say that there’s a song we’re working on now that we’re so excited to put into the set. It’s going to be a highlight of our live shows going forward, I think.
What’s special about this band is that before you’re musicians, you’re fans of this scene, and that influences everything that you do. Do you think it’s best to never lose that feeling, no matter how far into this you get?
A big reason why we’re here is because we’ve been inspired by other artists, but being fans of our own music is the most important thing. That drives us to never want to make anything lacklustre, bad, or lazy. There’s sometimes an aspect of ego at play when artists want to separate themselves from fans, and there’s a degree of separation that naturally happens, but we are just people. There’s nothing egregiously special about most musicians, and we spent enough time in the DIY scene to not think too highly of ourselves. I am grateful that we can connect with the people who connect with our music, because that’s one of the coolest parts of being in a band. Being fans of our art helps put everything in perspective for us, and with that outlook we know what it means when somebody comes up to us and says, ‘Your album changed the way I look at music’. I know what albums did that for me, and I know what that feels like. If anything, that helps us to write better music. It keeps us inspired, and it keeps us holding on to that feeling.
With new music already in the works, what does the future of The Home Team look like?
We have a couple of extra songs that would be cool to release on a deluxe version of The Crucible Of Life, and that will most likely happen, but I can’t make any promises yet. Honestly, we never really know what’s going to happen, but we’ve kind of started on the next album. All of us are a little hesitant to fully get into it, but I do think that the next album will take less time overall than this one did. In the meantime, though, we are going to be filling in the gaps a little better. We will have things for people to chew on, and we are preparing those now. I would like to not have to go more than eight months without releasing something from now on, so there’s going to be plenty to tide people over until a new record is on its way.
The Crucible Of Life is out now
