Broken Apex stretch beyond hard rock on a sweeping, piano-led track about finding your way back to what matters.
The best songs know how to leave enough room for you to put a little of yourself inside them.
Broken Apex understand that on ‘Coming Home’.
There is an obvious story here about returning after being lost for a while, but the track never locks that idea into one neat definition.
Home could be a person, a place, the version of yourself you were trying to get back to, or simply whatever waits at the end of a particularly long stretch of road.
For me, there is something almost spiritual about it.
We are all heading somewhere, after all. Towards the end of a project, a relationship, a life, a personal best, God, absolutely nothing, pick your philosophy. ‘Coming Home’ taps into that feeling without needing to explain it to death.
And importantly, Broken Apex know how to land the song around it.
It opens with optimism already built into the bones. Piano sits underneath the track almost the entire way, giving everything this steady, purposeful march while Giovana Teixeira’s drums push it forward.
I love that piano.
It would have been very easy for a rock band to use it as little more than an emotional opening device before throwing it away once the guitars arrived, but Broken Apex keep returning to it. It becomes the thing holding the song together.
When it does disappear, there is a reason.
The band hits the ground properly, guitars opening up as the track moves into its heavier rock territory. Suddenly all that restraint has somewhere to go. Then the piano returns because, frankly, it knows where it belongs. That push and pull gives ‘Coming Home’ much of its emotional weight.
Frontman John Flohr sits comfortably across both sides of the track. His voice has enough grit to carry the bigger rock moments, but there is a melodic instinct underneath it that stops the song becoming unnecessarily heavy.
That appears to be the point.
Broken Apex might come from hard rock, but ‘Coming Home’ finds them stretching towards something broader: indie rock, melodic pop-rock and old-school arena-sized songwriting all brushing up against each other.
The chorus is immediately catchy without feeling calculated, and as the track builds, it gets properly sweeping. Not too sweeping, but just enough.
There is something satisfying about hearing musicians with decades behind them still interested in pushing at the edges of what they do. Flohr and Daniel Jorgensen have spent more than 30 years honing their respective crafts, yet ‘Coming Home’ doesn’t sound like a band trying to preserve an old idea of rock.
It sounds like they are still curious, and that might be what I like most about it.
There is substance here, but Broken Apex aren’t so busy making a serious song about life that they forget somebody actually has to want to play the thing again.
I do.
‘Coming Home’ is warm, earnest and gloriously unfashionable about having a bit of heart. It knows where it wants to go, takes the long road there, and makes the journey feel worthwhile.
Listen to ‘Coming Home’ below.
