“Music for the dancefloor”: Home Counties on new music, independent venues, and appearance at Footsteps Festival

Photo by Emma Last

Ahead of their appearance at new London festival Footsteps this May, we chatted to dance-punk group Home Counties about their musical inspirations, the importance of independent venues, and their plans for this year.

How would you describe your music to people who haven’t heard it before? 

Synth-forward wonky-guitar music for the dancefloor.

We shared your debut album with our readers back in May last year. How’s life been treating you since the album release and what have you been up to since?

Thanks for sharing the album! We had a great tour right after releasing the album in May, followed by numerous festivals in summer, which was amazing. Seeing how quickly people had taken to the album, which was quite a departure from our previous EPs, really gave us the confidence to keep pushing forward with new material once we got home. We spent the latter half of the year in and out of the studio working on the next thing.

Your sound is such a brilliant blend of post-punk, art-pop and everything in between. Who would you say are your biggest musical influences and what inspires you? 

Thank you! It’s quite a mixed bag really. I think the obvious influences, especially on the last album, were early-80s Talking Heads and 2000s dance-rock of bands like LCD Soundsystem, Hot Chip, The Rapture etc. We also take a lot of inspiration from early 00s Pop, like the vocal production of Britney, as well as more recent electronic pop like La Roux or Charlie XCX for arrangement and synth sounds. At times we’ve thought we’ve made the poppiest thing ever and worry we’d gone too far, but everyone still says it sounds like Home Counties, so we enjoy expanding into that world more and more.

What can people expect from your set at Footsteps Festival this year?

Knowing the venue, I think it’s going to be a sweaty one! As we live within ten minutes’ walk of Paper Dress Vintage, we’ll all be in great moods from not having to travel, so hopefully they’ll be a bit of a party vibe going on. By May, we’ll have quite a lot of new material in the set, so it will be a great chance to debut some new stuff in an intimate setting.

Footsteps will be taking over a handful of independent venues across London. How have independent music venues and grassroots spaces impacted your journey as a band? 

Independent venues have been completely pivotal to everything we’ve done as a band. It was great having the opportunity to play venues and towns new to us in Independent Venue Week back in January. We met so many people working at venues who are completely driven by their love of music and have to constantly battle to stay afloat. Without them, bands like us would never have been given opportunities to play, so it is really important that we keep supporting them to keep them alive.

Any other 2025 plans you’d like to plug?

We’ve just finished recording our second album which we’re aiming to put out and tour later in the year. We’re really excited by the evolution of our sound on the new record and can’t wait to see how it goes down!

Catch Home Counties at Paper Dress Vintage on 20 May as part of London’s Footsteps Festival.