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State Champs announce 2025 tour with The Home Team and Broadside
Following the release of their self-titled album in November, State Champs will be back in Europe and the UK next February.
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The Home Team: “Be true to yourself and your tastes. If you hone your art as much as possible, you will create something that is unique”
They say that hard work pays off, and for Seattle’s purveyors of heavy pop The Home Team, they’re finally reaping the rewards after more than a decade toiling away. With a career-best album in their arsenal and a sold-out UK tour on the horizon, we sit down with mainman Brian Butcher to reflect on how they got here and why they had to keep on pushing – even when all felt lost…
- Words:
- Mischa Pearlman
- Photography:
- Rickelle Lee Tavares
With his long, mouse-blond hair, a cheeky, infectious smile, his moustache and the two piercings in the right side of his nose, Brian Butcher doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’d be into bodybuilding. He seems much more like someone who’s about to embark on a tour of the UK that completely sold out six months ago. Which he is, with his band The Home Team.
But appearances can be deceiving, and people contain multitudes, so although it might weird, the Explore page of the singer’s Instagram is almost entirely big, muscly men showing off their big, muscly muscles – an algorithmic peculiarity that Brian shows Kerrang! with an almost-childlike excitement in his Seattle kitchen.
“Hold on,” he says eagerly, reaching for his phone. “Let me just, like… Let me just…” A huge grin spreads across his face, as it often will during the conversation. “Yes! Yes! Literally. Look at this!” he exclaims, and turns his phone towards us. “It’s all bodybuilders – and then, for some reason, Sabrina Carpenter,” he laughs, pointing out the odd post out among a screen of well-oiled buff dudes.
While Brian is perplexed as to why his social media is like that (“I don’t even follow very many bodybuilders… I think I just clicked on one too many”), the fact that they’re there at all is definitely linked to a relatively new outlook, and his life as a musician: be consistent and learn to love what you do, regardless of the challenges. A bodybuilding byproduct, if you will.
That positive mantra is a particularly important part of the equation for The Home Team’s third album, The Crucible Of Life, because it’s a record centred around – and inspired by – the struggles and difficulties that come with being in a band. In fact, at times, its songs even go so far as to question why they should continue making music, and if the slog of doing so is even worth it – even though their audience was starting to grow. It made Brian feel exasperated, exhausted and uncertain about, well, everything Home Team-related.
“The biggest issues we ran into making this album,” Brian explains, “were growing pains regarding the amount of touring we were doing. It was very hard to write on the road, we were doing longer sets to more people under more pressure, with more important eyes looking at us. It was also tough to navigate different people having a hand in writing or music with us, because we really like our own creative direction.”
The fact that the record exists at all is proof that Brian got past the stumbling blocks that initially inspired it. It's the result of he and the other members of The Home Team – guitarist John Baran, bassist Ryne Olson and drummer Daniel Matson – adhering to a vital life lesson.
“Being consistent over a long period of time will go so much further than, in my opinion, anything else,” the singer says. “And I just started to realise that at the gym over the last six months. It’s not something I’ve always liked. Since my freshman year of college, which is 11 years ago now, I’ve been weightlifting and going to the gym. I’ve been a skinny guy the majority of my life. I saw a lot of progress in college, but then after college it died down and getting myself to go to the gym was difficult – and mostly because I didn’t enjoy being there. I was like, ‘I could be playing video games right now, or working on music.’ But in the last six months of being able to work out on tour, I have now started to gain an itch to go. Last night I was like, ‘I can’t wait to go do legs tomorrow morning!’ If you had told me that a year ago, I would have been like, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ I really think if you can get yourself to like doing something, you will do it.”
That’s not something that applies to actually making music for Brian – his love for that has always been there – but more to his determination concerning, and ambitions for, the band, especially all the boring stuff that comes along with it. The hard and often unforgiving graft of it all.
“People don’t really look at music and art as something you need to spend years and years doing – beyond the practice aspect,” he continues. “I think that’s the most common thing that people look at, like, ‘Yeah, you’ve got to practice over years and years to become really good at your instrument.’ But you also just have to develop a fanbase over years and years. You have to develop your taste over years and years. I would say taste might be the most important part of that if you’re trying to make art. You have to develop your sense of creativity and what you feel like is going to break you out of the mould that you might be stuck in. Humans just do things they love to do – it’s not rocket science.”
Brian’s passion and enthusiasm for what he does is palpable. You can almost feel the goosebumps rising on his arms as he talks about his band, his music, his life. When he does so, he exudes a pure joy that visibly demonstrates how all the hard work and dedication that's led The Home Team to where it is today has been worth it. He rarely stops smiling. And he practically bursts when presented with the late playwright Samuel Beckett’s famous quote about perseverance: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
“I have no answer for how to get yourself to like doing something,” he admits, as he reconciles the idea of struggling to do something you love. “Sometimes it’s accepting that you’ll never like doing it and maybe choose a different path. Sometimes it’s accepting that you will never like doing it and it’s just going to be a hard part of your life. But if you can do something long enough, create a habit and… fail better! I’m totally thinking about that, because that’s great. If you can create a habit that you work into your life, and you genuinely enjoy and want to go do this thing, there is a 500,000 per cent chance that you’re going to do it more often.”
Technically, The Home Team have been going since 2013. Though initially formed by John and Daniel, who had previously played together in a number of hardcore and metal bands, they became their true selves a little more recently. Brian didn’t join until 2015, and they released their debut album, Better Off, in 2018. But it was after Ryne joined the fold in 2019 that they started to really find their groove, evolving from the emotionally-charged pop-punk of that debut to something more unique that coloured outside the scene’s guidelines.
For while that first record wasn’t just pop-punk by numbers – in fact, it’s punctuated throughout by bursts of Panic! At The Disco-esque dramatics – it was still largely indebted to the accepted form of the genre. But with 2021’s appropriately-titled Slow Bloom, The Home Team truly came into their own. Infusing their baseline sound with a wide variety of musical flourishes from the worlds of metal, pop, soul and funk, it was previous collaborator Skyler Accord who came up with a name for this hard-to-define style of music: heavy pop.
“I feel like we fit into a lot of nooks,” says Brian, “which is really convenient. Inconveniently, we don’t perfectly fit into any nook. Actually, I don’t know if I would call that inconvenient – there is strength to be had in that as well, when people can’t quite pin down our sound. But we started identifying as heavy pop, and that is the closest thing we’ve got. I still don’t even think that’s perfect.”
It might not be perfect, but it conveys pretty well the two extremes that combine to give The Home Team’s songs their unique identity. It also means that they aren’t beholden to one genre in particular. For example, they’ve been on the road with The Used and Don Broco, and a couple of months after their sold-out headline tour of the UK, they'll be returning to the UK to support State Champs. They’ve also played with the likes of Senses Fail, Caskets and With Confidence, among others.
“I feel like we can play to metal fans and we can play to pop-punk fans,” smiles Brian. “I’m not too worried about either. We just went on tour with Neck Deep – and let me tell you, those fans like pop-punk! When we started playing She’s Quiet [from that first, more pop-punky album], oooh, that venue was a lot more lively. Which is totally fine – I knew exactly what we were getting into with that, and I’m really happy we were able to make a lot of fans on that tour.”
Brian freely admits that there was a dip in the crowd’s energy when they then played Turn You Off, a song from the new album and one which he labels “probably the least pop-punk song we have”, but he noticed that people were nevertheless still paying attention.
“It shows that people are listening to us no matter what they listen to,” he continues. “Although there are some hurdles to be had with not being able to pin down our sound exactly, I think overall it is a strength.”
It’s worth re-emphasising that two of The Home Team's members were previously involved in Seattle’s metal scene. As such, it was something of a risk to switch it up, but it turns out that fans were actually, and perhaps surprisingly, cool with it.
“The people that weren’t down with our new sound back in, like, 2015, when we were making essentially pop-punk music, were probably not people that we were going to keep around as friends anyway,” admits Brian. “And to be honest, the vast majority of the scene was actually insanely supportive. I can’t tell you how many metal shows we played as a pop-punk band and they loved it. Everybody was super into it and super supportive.”
It is, of course, rather ironic that when The Home Team started making the music they wanted to make, rather than what they thought they should, is when they got more successful. What does Brian attribute that to?
“Being different,” he smiles. “I think where that strength comes in is really finding something nobody’s done before. That’s way easier said than done, and I think the easiest way to do that is to be true to yourself and your tastes. Because chances are, if you hone your art as much as possible and don’t try to copy other people, you will create something that is unique, because every single person on this planet is unique. And eventually, if you just keep doing things and you keep an open mind, you will come across a fusion of things that is unlike anything else.”
“Better Off was our attempt to sell out”
It wasn’t always that way. Brian admits that Better Off was actually a conscious and self-aware attempt to make it big. They wrote songs that tried to conform to the genre rather than relying on their own creativity and original ideas. It didn’t really work. So they threw caution to the wind and went back to what they’d been doing beforehand, which was really just whatever they felt like. And then they doubled down.
“If I’m going to be completely honest,” Brian smiles, “without sounding too disingenuous, Better Off was our attempt to sell out. It was what we thought people wanted to hear and we were like, ‘Okay, well, we’ve been doing what we love forever. Let’s try something a little new. Let’s try something more digestible.’ And then when that didn’t really do what we wanted it to, we said, ‘Let’s go back to doing what we like!’ But now we had this whole new concept of what the band is. And so once we started fusing metal elements back into it, that’s when we got this heavy pop sound that we have now. And that’s when the people who were previously just supportive of us said, ‘Oh, I actually like this.’ Like, ‘I liked you guys back then, but I like this music. This is way cooler.’ And we were like, ‘We think so, too!’”
He laughs heartily, and it’s hard to not want to laugh along with him, because he’s clearly relishing being in this band. Perhaps the most exciting and impressive thing about The Home Team is that, after more than a decade honing their skills, people are flocking to them – as proved by their upcoming UK run. And while there are plenty of other more important metrics by which to judge success than ticket and album sales, that they have achieved so much while staying true to themselves is something to be applauded. What’s more, all the uncertainty and self-doubt that inspired The Crucible Of Life has pretty much vanished now.
“I like it more now,” Brian beams when asked where he stands now on the songs and what they’re about, as opposed to when he wrote them. “I’m very grateful that I can eventually step back from it and enjoy it and understand it and not be overcritical, because it would be a real bummer if I never got to that point. If I just always looked at the shortcomings of my art that I could see clearly, that would kind of suck. Slow Bloom was made kind of in a vacuum, because it was during COVID. We just threw stuff at the wall and, luckily, a lot of it stuck. This time it was like, ‘We have to make it stick!’”
“A huge part of how I connect with my art is how other people connect with it”
Now, here The Home Team are – rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of their insecurities and doubts. While those concerns might not sound exactly life-threatening, they certainly called the future of the band into question. But they wrote their way through their troubles, and are now ready to reap the rewards. Something Brian is all too aware of.
“There’s a little spiel that I do onstage,” he says, “talking about how these are problems that 22-year-old me would have loved to have. And so as much as I’d like to complain about the process of making this album and how difficult it was, realistically, I’m grateful for those problems because it just means that everything’s going in the right direction. Without them, I would be a little worried that things aren’t progressing the way they’re supposed to be. So that’s a new feeling since the album – having gratitude for those problems.”
Even just chatting to Brian for an hour, it’s clear that he discovered a hell of a lot about himself during the process of making The Crucible Of Life. He’s learned what it takes to both be himself, and be happy being himself, and being in this band. Which is definitely a good thing, because despite what Instagram suggests, he knows he's not cut out to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“I don’t think my body frame could keep up with all that,” he laughs. “I’m still a skinny guy.”
And that’s probably for the best. The Home Team have invested a great deal of blood, sweat and tears into their art so far, and they’re now on the cusp of something genuinely special and wonderful. It’s taken a while, but if it hadn’t, they wouldn’t be here, nor would this album exist. Fail better, indeed.
The Crucible Of Life is out now via Thriller. The Home Team tour the UK from December 7 then return with State Champs in February 2025 – get your tickets now.
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