The Home Team

A side project that outgrew its brief

The Home Team began in Seattle in 2013 as something neither founder took entirely seriously. Guitarist John Baran and drummer Daniel Matson both came out of metal, and the songs they started writing together were pop-punk — a deliberate break from what they already knew how to do. The band existed in that provisional state for two years before the piece that fixed it arrived: Brian Butcher joined on vocals in 2015. Bassist Ryne Olson completed the current line-up in 2019, and it has not changed since.

The debut album, Better Off, landed in 2018 on Revival Recordings and set out the shape of the thing — rock instrumentation carrying songs built to pop logic rather than punk logic. It was a competent record from a band still working out what it was. The next one answered the question.

Slow Bloom and a name for the sound

Slow Bloom, released in 2021 and reissued in a deluxe edition the following year, was produced by Skyler Acord and marked the point at which an online audience found the band in numbers. It also produced the label they still use. Butcher has said the phrase "heavy pop" was not theirs — Acord suggested it after working with them at length, and it stuck because it described what was actually happening: songs assembled like pop songs, played on rock instruments.

Butcher has been explicit about where he looks for ideas, and it is not within metal or hardcore. He has pointed to Doja Cat and Doechii as reference points, folding R&B phrasing and pop construction into a band whose rhythm section grew up on heavier music. That combination is the whole proposition, and it is why the band's audience overlaps awkwardly with several scenes at once without belonging cleanly to any of them.

The move to Thriller Records in 2023 gave them a bigger platform for the record that followed.

The Crucible of Life

The Crucible of Life arrived on 12 July 2024, twelve tracks on Thriller Records, and remains the record the band are still touring. Its subject is the psychological cost of working in creative fields — pressure, comparison, the slow attrition of trying to make a living from art — delivered through grooves rather than complaint.

Reviewers responded to the density of hooks. Distorted Sound gave it 9/10 and made the point that an unusual proportion of a twelve-track album consisted of singles or songs that could easily have been singles, picking out Roommates//Overtime, Hell, Walk This World With Me, Somebody Else's Face and Love & Co. Kerrang's review noted the gap between the dark artwork and metal-sounding title and the pop-rock actually inside, and read the record as a step up from Slow Bloom. Horn sections, slap bass and whispered R&B passages sit alongside distorted guitar; the album is pop music played by people who can play heavy music, not the reverse.

A deluxe edition followed in June 2025, carrying the single Worthy — now the song that closes the live set.

It Lives, It Changes, released without warning

On 26 June 2026 the band put out It Lives, It Changes with no announcement: eleven tracks, around thirty-four minutes, made up of reworked versions of songs from across their catalogue, each given a new arrangement and a new title. The reworkings include Hopelessly Romantic with lophiile, and Paradise with Intervals and Arcade Dreams. The record ends with Spirit, the only entirely new song on it.

Butcher's stated intention was to breathe new life into songs the band's audience already knew. Practically, it functions as a hinge — a way of clearing the existing catalogue before the band move on, which fits the language they have been using about the current touring cycle being the end of a chapter rather than the middle of one.

Where they stand in October 2026

This has been the busiest year of the band's existence, and most of it was spent in support slots in rooms bigger than they can sell alone. Bilmuri announced The Kinda Hard Tour on 9 December 2025, a 21-date North American run with The Home Team and GANG! opening; it ran from the Fillmore in Denver on 17 April to Boston on 17 May, taking in the Hollywood Palladium, the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, the Rooftop at Pier 17 in New York and the Anthem in Washington DC. Days later the band played both legs of Slam Dunk Festival, at Hatfield Park on 23 May and Temple Newsam in Leeds on 24 May.

The Crucible of Life Tour Part II was announced in early June 2026 and opened the North American leg in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on 15 September, with Heart Attack Man, UnityTX, Archers and Differences across various dates. Festival appearances took in Louder Than Life in Louisville and Aftershock in Sacramento, plus Vans Warped Tour dates in Washington DC, Mexico City and Orlando. From 25 to 30 September the band opened for Coheed and Cambria, including the Neverender Rocks show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on 29 September alongside Turnover.

The European leg is the part still to come, and it is headline work. Thirteen dates are on sale: four in Germany from 27 October — Technikum in Munich, Hole 44 in Berlin, Docks Hamburg on the 30th and Carlswerk Victoria in Cologne on the 31st — then seven in Britain from 3 November, running Manchester Academy 2, the Garage in Glasgow, the O2 Institute in Birmingham, Y Plas in Cardiff, the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London on the 8th, Northumbria Students' Union in Newcastle on the 10th and Stylus in Leeds on the 11th, before a Sydney show at the Oxford Art Factory on 1 December. The UK run was announced on 22 May 2026 and went on general sale on 26 May through MyTicket, with Arrows In Action and True North on every date.

Butcher framed the British dates plainly: "We put so much into this show and the people of Britain deserve to see it before we turn the page to the next chapter." He has also noted that several of these venues are rooms the band previously opened in.

The set as it stands

The current set is tightly fixed. Across 31 logged 2026 performances the running order barely moved: Hell opened 26 of them, and Worthy closed all 31 — no encores were played at any show on record. In between sit Brag, Right Through Me, Turn You Off, Overtime, Slow Bloom, Move It or Lose It, Somebody Else's Face, Walk This World With Me, Watching All Your Friends Get Rich, Loud and Danger. Support-slot sets compress this: at the Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines on 26 September, opening for Coheed and Cambria, the band played eleven songs and cut Turn You Off and Danger.

The headline show is a longer and more physical proposition. At a sold-out Belasco in Los Angeles on 9 November 2025, on the first leg of this tour, Butcher worked the stage with hip movements a reviewer compared to Elvis, Baran spun his guitar, and Matson went in hard from the first bar. Victor Viramontes-Pattison of Arrows In Action came out to sing All Squeezed Out with Butcher — the sort of thing that happens when the opening band have been friends for years. Nothing about the current staging has been documented in detail beyond the band's own claim to have invested heavily in the production for this run.