The Purple Helmets deliver a masterpiece with "Coming Home"

In "Coming Home," The Purple Helmets offer an emotionally weighty bookend to their celebrated album "Weirdo Squad." However, the band is chiseling a memory. This song is the emotional exhale at the end of a long, strange trip. It's intimate, contemplative, and chilling in the most gorgeous sense of that phrase.

The Nova Scotia–bred group skilled at scrubbing down indie rock until only memorable hooks remain doubles down on their folk storytelling side here, summoning spectral echoes of "Farewell to Nova Scotia" and the shadowy lyricism of Wintersleep's "Lighthouse." But "Coming Home" is a fresh evolution. The Purple Helmets haunt with a sound that mingles memories with emotional immediacy.

You can hear the fingerprints of 90s Brit-pop all over it, from the atmospheric melody to the introspective grit of Stereophonics and Oasis. However, whereas those influences tended to lean into swagger, "Coming Home" is stripped-down, trading bravado for raw openness.

The vocal weariness is of a piece with any world weariness here, and it feels earned, not affected. It's as if the band is singing through the fog of memory, calling on decades of aural experience to write a song that sounds less like a recording and more like a confession. Understated but purposeful production, there's nothing here to distract from the messaging. It's music made for dusk, driving alone, and leaving a place you used to call home.

This song is a moment, a feeling, and a quiet triumph. As the closing track of an album that Jamsphere magazine recently called "the last finest Canadian record of 2025," it does precisely what a closing track should do. "Coming Home proves that TPH still writes chapters worth reading and hearing. Their voyage might be "coming home," but it's nowhere near a conclusion.

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