The Home Team are quickly becoming one of the most exciting bands in alternative music, blending their slick pop hooks with heavy riffs and a larger than life stage presence. Their second album, The Crucible Of Life, dropped last year and was followed up with a deluxe edition earlier in 2025, including their latest single “Worthy” which further solidified their reputation as a band on the rise. Known for putting on an energetic show complete with synchronised dance moves, they did not disappoint at Melbourne’s Margaret Court Arena where they opened for Mayday Parade and Jack’s Mannequin. The crowd showed up early and eager, filling up the floor for The Home Team’s set. Fresh off the stage, I caught up with lead singer Brian Butcher backstage to talk about touring with Mayday Parade and The Crucible of Life.
During their set, Butcher commented that this was one of the biggest headlining venues the band had played, and he’s buzzing with adrenaline as we sit down to chat. “We’ve been doing this a long time now that we don’t really get too nervous before shows, but my nerves will turn on because something’s about to happen. We just did the biggest tour of our lives, so we’re a little more conditioned to playing big rooms. If this was a year ago though, I would be freaking out.” He says of their experience on stage in Melbourne.
This tour marks their first opening slot in over four years, and being the first on a bill consisting of three bands is not an easy task, with early-arrivals trickling in and the majority of the crowd being unfamiliar with their set. It was clear this time, however, that Australian fans were eager for The Home Team, with early-arrivals showing up with big energy singing along to every word. “We’re definitely not as big here, we’re still finding our footing…When we’re supporting in an area that we’re not very popular in yet, the only thing that I can hope for is that by the end of the set they are significantly more energetic than the beginning of the set, and I think that happened tonight”.
The Home Team’s third studio album, The Crucible of Life, came out in 2024, with the deluxe edition released earlier this year. Now that the record has been out in the world for over a year, Butcher reflects on it, saying, “At the time, it was very hard to write, which is kind of what the whole album’s about. Now that it’s been out for well over a year, I think I can listen to the songs a little more objectively now. Fortunately, that has led me to believe that it’s a better album than I originally thought it was… We were a little nervous because the sound changed a bit from Slow Bloom. Slow Bloom was the first album that did well, so we were like, ‘how far can we really depart?’, but it is now definitely our most successful album.”
With the deluxe edition of The Crucible of Life, the band also released their single “Worthy”, which has been racking up streams and doing exceptionally well. Butcher shares that when the idea came around to do a deluxe version, the band agreed that they would do one song that was ‘just for them’, not having high hopes for its success, wanting to go all out and make it as weird as they wanted. This method proved to be the key, because in Butcher’s own words, “It’s the top song- what the hell?!” The other tracks included on the deluxe edition- “Rat Queen” and “Where Has My Friend Gone?”, were written for the standard edition but were cut from the track listing.
The Crucible Of Life is a natural evolution of the sound that The Home Team have developed over the years, with their debut record Better Off being more of a classic pop-punk record, while Slow Bloom is “weird as fuck” to quote Butcher. He then goes on to reveal, “Just to peek into the future a little bit, from what we’ve written so far for the next one, we are probably going to continue on that journey of evolving that sound. We’re going to push it a little further this time, just because we feel empowered by Worthy doing so well.”
Touring with pop-punk titans like Mayday Parade doesn’t go unappreciated by The Home Team. On what it means to them to be on the tour, Butcher says, “We all grew up in metal, so back when we were hitting our stride we were all listening to crazy fucking metal shit. However, there was no avoiding them, we knew who they were since their first album came out. And to this day, their influence cannot be overstated. The other thing is, since day one they’ve just been so sweet and nice which is really cool.”
It doesn’t take much to see that The Home Team have an incredibly unique aesthetic- both in their style and sound. “It was Slow Bloom and COVID that did it”, Brian says of how they found a style that really suited them, “Better Off didn’t do what we thought it would, and I think that’s because that was an album made for other people. We thought people would like it based on what we saw was popular. It just wasn’t really the kind of music we were looking to make. When that didn’t work, we said, ‘we should just get weird with it’, and right at the time that we started to record that album everything shut down. So, we ended up with unlimited time to work on it, we stayed within our close-knit group and just went to town recording that album- we spent so much creative energy making it as good as can be and just stretching our artistic boundaries.”
While this experimental sound carried its way over to The Crucible of Life, the two recording experiences couldn’t have been more different, with a larger team involved in the recording of their most recent record. “We got really nervous, we were like, ‘what’s happening? Is this gonna sound right? And we had to say no to some songs… there are some that won’t ever see the light of day because they just didn’t feel like us. They were good songs, but they belonged with another band. That was very hard.” Butcher reveals. “Making The Crucible Of Life taught us so much about what we don’t want to do that we are extremely empowered to move forward with the next album, hopefully combining that creative control from Slow Bloom but also allowing other people to come in and help along the way.”
The Crucible of Life and the single “Worthy” are out now. Head to their official website for more.
