Home Front Offer Danceable Hope in a Crumbling World

The Edmonton synth-punks’ new album airs grievances over propellant rhythms.

By Khagan Aslanov

Photo by Lyle Bell

Published on November 26, 2025

Some bands fall together by sheer necessity. Others arrive because two musicians, after years spent carving out separate legacies in Edmonton’s underground, finally collide at the right moment with the right idea. Home Front emerged from that collision — a project sparked by curiosity rather than circumstance, driven by the desire to build something neither of its members had attempted before.

For Graeme McKinnon and Clint Frazier, longtime fixtures in their city’s punk, hardcore, and electronic scenes, the chemistry was immediate. What started as a loose experiment quickly locked into a shared language: hard-charging synth-punk informed by decades of listening, touring, tinkering, and obsessing. It’s music steeped in their pasts but unmistakably pointed toward the future — a place where hardcore, new wave, Oi, and industrial propulsion blur into something both punchy and strangely hopeful.

And hope, in Home Front’s world, isn’t naïve. It’s a survival tactic. It’s the reason their songs — jagged, volatile, wired with paranoia — also pulse with a desire for connection.

Such was the case for McKinnon and Frazier. With their respective bands on pause, the underground luminaries finally leaned into an idea they’d floated for years — a collaboration that would merge their past endeavours while sounding unlike any of them. Once they dug in, a hermetic rhythm formed quickly. Using synth-punk as a broad foundation, they folded in every genre they had ever studied, played, or obsessed over. The result is Home Front in the aggregate: hardcore, new wave, Oi, post-punk, and a streak of industrial propulsion tangled together beneath lyrics about inequity, anxiety, and the political and behavioural blockades that reinforce those crises.

For Frazier, that kind of cross-pollination came naturally. His days in electro-punk staples Shout Out Out Out Out had already primed him to bend and blur genre lines, and he’d recently been teaching himself piano and drilling into modern drum programming. McKinnon, whose roots run deeper in blistering hardcore, initially found the prospect daunting.

“From my vantage point, it seemed unattainable, and it took me a second to get my head around it. But I could hear possibilities when listening to a band like Sparks. The guitars are such a big part of the synths. Once we started blending our two worlds, it wasn’t a big stretch for Clint, but I was definitely moving upwards. But it turned out easier than I thought it would,” he explains.

Home Front resists tidy categorization, and they prefer it that way. Their integrated sound reads as a way forward — both aesthetically and practically. McKinnon cites Oi bands like Cock Sparrer and Angelic Upstarts shifting into new wave territory as a historical precedent. That multifaceted period, which he once hated as a teenager, now feels like their most vital work. For him, evading genre boundaries is as much about curiosity as it is about growing up as a listener and musician.

“When you’re a punk, you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. You’re just trying to mash shapes together. Sometimes, something original comes out of it,” he adds.

What further fuels Home Front is the pair’s easy rapport. When they talk, they seamlessly finish each other’s thoughts and volley compliments without hesitation. That rapport carries across their friendship, the studio, and the stage.

“Whenever I ask Graeme if he wants to go to the studio to try some things, he always says yes (and vice versa). For the past few years, we’ve just been pushing each other to record and write. You see it in the output. We’re putting out our third record, and we’re just five years in,” says Frazier.

To be punk in this era is to confront the world as it actually is — and Home Front aren’t blind to the accelerating right-wing turn shaping both the Western world and Alberta specifically. Coming from a DIY musical space built as a barricade against state abuse, disengagement isn’t an option. As their province slides further into social conservatism, policies threaten gender freedoms, fair wages, climate accountability, and basic dignity for marginalized people. Watch It Die becomes inherently political — sometimes directly, sometimes through broader collectivist framing — all while striving to maintain a human face.

“Our band name came together because we felt so alienated from the party government. Even the album artwork is a wild rose with oil on top of it. Here we are, at home, where you want to feel the most at peace, and our government is waging a war against labour, against trans youth, against anyone who’s marginalized. People surviving a drug epidemic are stomped on. Seniors go to their death in UCP’s healthcare. It’s bootlicking corporative bullshit,” McKinnon says.

Still, the album isn’t consumed by despair. Amid the bleakness, Home Front have crafted a record that invites listeners to gather, move, and feel together — songs that dance in the wreckage while insisting that solidarity is still worth chasing. In that sense, Watch It Die becomes a motor for hope.

Take “Light Sleeper,” the woozy single from the album. It gestures toward filmmaker Paul Schrader’s paranoiac noir, mourns a lost friend, and maps out how to persist in unstable times through communication, memory, and resolve. All of it delivered in a few recursive lines that glide between reeling post-punk tempos and Oi-style shout-along choruses. It’s as gloomy as it is uplifting — a portrait of humanity’s capacity to keep going as the walls close in.

“We want to be something that people can listen to, identify with, and know that there are other people out here,” says McKinnon.