Sea Girls, Hometown
Polydor Records
As we barrel towards their second full-length album, Sea Girls are reminding us of exactly what they do best on Hometown. It’s a certified anthem, that status bestowed upon it on Sea Girls’s tour earlier this year where the band gave us a taster of the tune. Between the sparkling chorus, the nostalgic subject matter, and Sea Girls’s trademark (but ever the more refined) knack for a guitar banger, Hometown could easily be a fan-favourite just on first listen.
Hometown is exactly what you expect from the name – a dreamy, at times melancholy and at times contented and nostalgic, look back at where you’ve come from and the things you’re missing. Lyrical nods to summer days and nights, being seventeen, getting drunk at parties and going through the difficult emotional rites of passage feel at once personal and like a Skins-esque movie montage of every quintessential teenage experience (which is a nostalgic feeling in itself). The whole lot are just made to be belted out in a crowd, particularly one of the track’s most poignant moments in which vocalist Henry Camamile’s voice is isolated as he sings “we didn’t talk cos it wasn’t cool to talk about”.
Looking back is always bittersweet, but Sea Girls make space for all the joy, sadness, and catharsis on Hometown. The blueprint they’ve had nailed from their earliest days is shining its brightest here, with upbeat guitar, stratospheric choruses, arms-to-the-sky bridges, darkly glimmering guitar lines… It’s everything that’s on the essential Sea Girls banger checklist, done the best they’ve ever done it – and it’s a promise of excellence for the record, too.
Homesick is out January 14th 2022.
