The Stay Homas members no longer live in that penthouse on Balmes street where they reenacted the 2020 quarantine, sincerely saying they’re “divorced” but apparently taking that apartment wherever they go. Their second album “HOMAS” is about that, with big letters like this, they emphasize home as a mood. “A record of us taking people home or bringing our home to theirs”, sums up Klaus Stroink, one of the band’s members.
Three years have passed and they haven’t stopped, expanding the stage (there are six of them) and releasing a lot of ‘singles’ and an epé so ‘HOMAS’ doesn’t exactly break the silence. All 14 songs are brand new and reflect the band’s character as a ‘melting pot’ of styles and emotional states. Guillem Boltó says the first idea was to “unite the sound a bit,” but then it happened. “We found that while we were making the songs, we still had a lot of different concerns and we wanted to show them all.”
get lost in music
So ‘HOMAS’ betrays the taste of ‘two thousand’ bands like Green Day or Blink-182, combining acoustic miniatures with more spectacular electronic raids or even the extreme punk-pop song ‘I don’t care’. “It’s a bit of a 2000 theme, yes, but it’s from 2023 because the sound is pretty tired of the ‘auto-tuning’,” Stroink says. With so much variety of sounds, Where is Stay Homas’ ID? “We’ve been trying to find that out since we started,” admits Rai Benet. “We’re on top of that. People see more connections between our songs than we do: the genre of the song, the sounds… I don’t know. I think we’re more lost than people realize.”
In the beginning, Stay Homas had good vibes above all with his message of relativizing pandemic disaster (remember this perhaps somewhat innocent invitation to “enjoy confinement” in the song ‘Be patient’), now guess what the new repertoire is “not so ‘happy’” and offers “more emotional and melancholic themes and greater depth”, Guess Klaus Stroink. In these times of duets and “playing,” it may come as a surprise that the album includes only one collaboration, that of The Tyets. “This is how the record asked us. It felt good to have something very belonging to us”.
All you can eat buffet
Although the three musicians come from Catalan festival backgrounds (they have been part of bands such as Doctor Prats and Búhos), theirs has a different aspect and also does not match the live urban music at the moment. Stay Homas has found his space away from the mainstream. “This gives us a challenge because people can’t find you easily, but we’ve forced ourselves to do whatever we want until the end result.”inspires Rai Benet. His thing is “snack” and “free buffet”, he notes. “We ate as much from the mix inherited from our bands as urban music and rock to make our combo plate.”
What is off their radar is the politics that has been so present in the environment over the past decade, where they have noticed signs of opportunism. “You can clearly see that a political slogan is for marketing, not political”, Reflects Rai Benet. “But someone told me that many families have come together over the years for activities related to ‘procés’ and now that it’s over, there’s no excuse to get together. There are concerts where you raise the flag and you know that it will be well received.” Benet says he feels “you were a little overwhelmed by the need to adopt a political discourse if you wanted to make music” and if you didn’t, you were a “sold out box”.
Stay Homas faces a summer festival filled with events like Cabró Rock, Canet Rock, Sons del Món, Cap Roig and Cambrils. And in Barcelona, at Cruïlla (July 8), there is a possibility that they will meet Rubén Blades again, as they did last year. “He takes care of us and loves us very much,” says Benet. “That day at Cruïlla was the best day this band has given us.”