The Homesick - The Big Exercise (LP) - Yellow Vinyl

The Homesick’s second album, The Big Exercise, arrived in February 2020 as their Sub Pop debut, and it plays like a band stepping into a bigger room without losing the weird spark that made people lean in the first time. The Dutch trio from Dokkum, Friesland, had already carved a cult following with Youth Hunt in 2017, but here they stretch out the canvas. You still get the nervy post‑punk core, the knotty basslines and deadpan harmonies, yet there’s a new fondness for odd colours, the kind you get from woodwinds and strings sneaking into the frame. The record is full of those left turns that feel surprising in the moment and inevitable the next time you hear them.

What’s striking is how playfully serious it is. The band lean into formal ideas, almost baroque in places, but never slip into museum mode. Jaap van der Velde and Elias Elgersma swap vocals and often stack them, which gives these songs a queasy brightness, like a choir that wandered into a garage rehearsal. Drummer Erik Woudwijk has a tidy, almost martial feel that keeps the more ornate flourishes from floating away. You can hear it when a song pivots from a tumbling guitar figure into a chant-like refrain, as if they’ve smuggled old liturgical vibes into a small Dutch practice space. It’s cerebral, but it still moves air in a room.

“I Celebrate My Fantasy” is the entry point for a lot of listeners, a prickly earworm that balances precision and mess with real charm. “Kaïn” goes darker and stranger, with biblical dread flickering through the lyrics while the arrangement coils around an insistent pulse. The hooks aren’t the obvious singalong kind, yet they bury themselves quietly. After a few plays you start humming odd intervals while making a cuppa, which feels like the album’s secret party trick. The Homesick are great at writing lines that don’t resolve in the way you expect, and the tension is where the sweetness hides.

Sub Pop is a good fit. The label’s history of backing idiosyncratic guitar records gives The Big Exercise a proper home, and the band repay the faith by making something that doesn’t sit neatly next to anyone else. Critics picked up on that at the time, with coverage across indie stalwarts like Pitchfork and Stereogum noting how the trio pushed beyond the blunt edges of Youth Hunt. You can hear that growth in the way the arrangements breathe, especially when additional instrumentation creeps in. It never feels tacked on. Instead, those reeds and strings act like sly backing singers, colouring the corners while the rhythm section keeps you pacing the floor.

Lyrically, the record is full of little puzzles and cultural detours. There are lines that read like private jokes and others that feel like a dispatch from a small town where people know too much about each other. The Homesick have a knack for turning parochial details into something almost mythic, then snapping back to a dry aside that makes you grin. That balance of heady and everyday is part of why the album rewards repeat plays. It’s not opaque for the sake of it, just written by people who trust you to follow a thought past the obvious rhyme.

If you’re the kind of listener who cares about pressing quality, The Big Exercise vinyl on Sub Pop does the music justice. The low end sits nicely, the vocals are present without getting sharp, and those extra instruments come through with proper texture. It’s the sort of album that blooms on a turntable, the dynamics a touch more vivid than on a quick stream. If you’re crate digging at a Melbourne record store, or comparing shipping on vinyl records Australia wide, this is one to grab while it’s still in print. And if you prefer to buy The Homesick records online, you’ll find plenty of copies floating around alongside other The Homesick albums on vinyl.

The Homesick were already an intriguing band. The Big Exercise makes them a compelling one. It’s a record that takes risks with arrangement and structure but never forgets the simple joy of a good chorus sneaking up on you. File it next to the clever misfits, then reach for it on a rainy afternoon when you want something bristly and beautiful. If you’ve been hunting for The Homesick vinyl and wondering where to start, this is the one. And if you’re searching for The Big Exercise vinyl specifically, don’t wait too long. Albums this odd and this well loved have a habit of disappearing, then suddenly becoming the thing everyone asks about at the counter.