Homegrown – Homegrown
Release Date: 5th December 2025
Label: Majestic Mountain Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Psych, Prog, Folk, Fuzz.
FFO: Himmellegeme, Motorpsycho, Graveyard, Brant Bjork, Witchcraft, Causa Sui.
Review By: Magnus Rotås
After a strong debut full-length last year titled Himalayaz – the Swedish fuzz-wizards Homegrown are already here with their next album, self-titled this time. The guys have climbed down from the Himalayan mountains and gone into the Swedish forests, where they keep growing their own homebrew style of psychedelic stoner rock. This time, integrating a lot of subtle folk elements into an overall warmer sound.
If you are feeling a thirst for something loose, free-flowing and completely in the spirit of psychedelic prog-jam, then I can already recommend this album.
This time around, the band has decided to ditch vocals entirely, and instead lets the riffs do the talking. It certainly makes for a different vibe on this album, one that is less attention grabbing, but on the other hand also more meditative and free flowing. I honestly really liked the vocals on their last album, but somehow I don’t miss them at all since the band is so good at trapping you into a nice groove, that once they start playing you are just floating away in the music.
“A thick, heavy elixir that’ll blast your soul straight into the endless prog cosmos,” the band says of their new effort.
Like many Scandinavian bands in this genre the instruments and production sound very 70s, so does Homegrown, but one word that constantly keeps popping up in my head every time I listen to this album is the word “medieval”. There is nothing modern about the music on this album at all, and I mean that in a good way. Take a listen to the track Mylingen as an example, which sounds like some Swedish medieval bards made a soundtrack for their kingdom’s doom and demise.
I must admit my love for this album was not instant, it needed a lot of time to grow (pun intended). But after a few listens it really clicked for me, probably because it’s an album that works best when you are in the mood to just groove out.
If there is one criticism I could see some have to this album it’s that most tracks blend a lot into each other, but honestly if it all was just one long track I wouldn’t have minded personally, since once I put this on I get so locked in to the groove the minutes fly by.
There is a bit of a twinkle in the eye and some dashes of humor on here as well, the track Gånglåt till Käringberget which roughly translates to “walking song to the old woman mountain” which has a sort of goofy melody that is trudging along. I can see how a track like this would be a certain skip for some, but I think it fits the vibe of the album perfectly and really compliments nicely the images and feelings the rest of the album provokes in you.
It’s covered in dirt, grown over by mushrooms, reeks of smoke, obscured by the trees and feels like it was written and recorded some 500 years ago in a Swedish medieval village by peasants and bards, who were naturally gifted musicians. It oozes confidence from a band that so fully commits to a vision like this, and it oozes skill when they actually pull it off as well!
(4 / 5)
