Good Neighbours – Home Review

The best of neighbours will deposit loose beers from a multipack on your doorstep while you work away, whittling the early morning hours down to a mangled spear to jab at unsuspecting artists. Thank you for the Corona, which is still resting in the fridge along with three bottles of sherry-infused Peroni. Grim stuff, but there it rests. Good Neighbours sound as though they would keenly deposit bottle after bottle into the draw under the fridge, and their latest track Home is the perfect slice of music to listen to as you sink one of those well-deserved beers. TikTok implosions be damned, good music is as good music does.  

Short and sweet, just like the algorithm wants you to listen to music. Even then much of it is lent to whistling and simpler notes. Home does have the titular feel to it, and there is much to be said for the warmth it creates and how well managed the build and burnout feel. Take yourself home, weather the storm in those four familiar walls. Good Neighbours may capture what it means to be somewhere intimate, and their separation of what home is as a building and what it can indicate as a place of love. This separation is sharp and sophisticated, particularly for a track which is primarily whistles and echoed vocals promising to take a listener back to those comfortable spots.  

All those experiences of being home soon turn into feelings. Something which can no longer be lived. Familial cooking, familiar times in the back garden or reliving the summery days of youth where there was a month of freedom to look forward to. No more. Live on in the pits of no breaks and let the real world crush you down. It is a horrifying time, the fear envelops and warm numbers like Home feel rather numb at times. Numb to the torture of never experiencing these days again. All it does is serve as a reminder to what you may no longer have, even if those family members are still kicking around and just two trains away. Times change. Bob Dylan warned us of that and everyone has been playing catch-up with his words ever since. Home is as sincere as it gets, and it is grating and uncomfortable because of it.  

It is hard not to give credit to the TikTok storm the song created before its release and how Good Neighbours is a clear-cut example of how best to use social media. At a time when there is nothing better than enduring through the day and getting online, Home finds itself quietly asking listeners to record themselves in the great outdoors and piecing this song onto those patches of green and pleasant lands. A neat message which brings you right back to this unfulfilling and empty desire to post, post, post. At least you can do so with Home backing it, the solid work underlying this one feels like a worrying step away from longer formations of work and albums – though it is early days for this collective.