Straight-up rock’n’roll doesn’t come up too often around here, which is exactly why High Home’s “Dead Prayers” makes sense as today’s premiere. It’s a simple, hard-driving opening cut from a band better known for sad punk songs and heartland-minded hooks, and it goes right back to the source without losing the bruised feeling that runs through the rest of the record.
The Toronto duo’s debut full-length, “Someday, I’ll Be Gone”, arrives March 31 as a self-released LP through Broke Guy Music. The album has been sitting in some form since 2015, picking up rewrites, cuts, additions, and a different shape as the years kept moving. Bry Brocoy had already put out his solo album “Distractions” in 2022; now High Home are finally getting their first full-length out the door with a record that was never going to sound like it would have ten years ago.
“This album took ten years to finish. It could have came out a decade ago but I’m glad it didn’t. It wouldn’t sound the way it does now if we had tried back then. All the years in between made the album what it is today. Thank you for sticking around for it.”
That long timeline is the whole point of the record. “Someday, I’ll Be Gone” is pitched as a coming-of-age album “ten years too late,” one built around fleeting time, faded memories, and the fact that everything eventually slips out of your hands. Dingy bars, borrowed smokes, crumbling relationships, the usual stuff that starts out as everyday life and only later turns into the thing you can’t stop thinking about.
Brocoy says the first version of the album began taking shape in 2015, when he was dealing with the loss of several people, places, and things he had held onto for years. “It felt like I was watching my youth die in real time,” he says. “Experiencing so much loss at once really forces you to accept that nothing is truly permanent. When you’re young, you take things for granted, and when your world turns upside down, it forces you to grow up.”
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“Dead Prayers” was always supposed to open the album, and not just because it came first. Brocoy says it was “the first song that I wrote that set the record in motion.”
He also says it’s “not about one thing,” but about trying to catch where he was at one very specific moment: “It’s an absolute mess of feelings that are explored throughout the album: the discomfort of growing older, accepting that someone you loved is gone, and just hoping that things will get better.” He likes “the idea of throwing people into the middle of the story,” and says the track “makes more and more sense as you move through the album.”
That idea of being dropped into something half-finished fits the way the album was made. The core was mapped out around 2015-2016, with a clear debt to the wave of 2010s “orgcore” bands that were having their moment then. Brocoy says about half the record, especially the second half, stayed close to its original form, and the sequencing never really changed. Time did the editing. Songs that weren’t strong enough fell away, newer ones came in, and the whole thing got tighter.
“The Tide” was the only song to survive a rewrite instead of being cut completely, mainly because Brocoy still saw it as narratively necessary. Even then, it needed “almost a complete rearrangement” as he got less satisfied with the first version over years of sharpening his songwriting.
That slow reshaping says a lot about where “Someday, I’ll Be Gone” finally landed. The record started from High Home’s love of punk rock, but ten years gave it a wider pull. Alongside that foundation, Brocoy points to Motown and soul, Springsteen, and alternative rock as part of what gradually worked its way into the album’s final shape. The result is a record that still holds onto the band’s sad-punk core, but doesn’t sound trapped inside the version of itself that first appeared back in 2015.
“Someday, I’ll Be Gone” comes out March 31 through Broke Guy Music.
