Lead singer of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Alex Ebert, has come to the defence of the group’s 2009 track ‘Home’.
Its saccharine lyrics and hummable tune made it a staple of what the internet has since dubbed “stomp clap” music, by which they mean the indie-folk tracks that briefly soundtracked an era defined by mason jars and man buns.
The ubiquity of the plucky track has seemingly become more grating over time, with an old clip of the band performing the song – notably captioned “the worst song in the world” – reaching almost 90million views on X/Twitter earlier this week.
Now, Ebert has weighed in, not only defending the track but declaring his band the originators of the genre. In a new video on Instagram, he explained that you knew “the bones” of a song were good if they could outlive their context, which he said was the case for ‘Home’.
Worst song ever made https://t.co/CJRrvp3C4r pic.twitter.com/BS4wHAqrLK
— Justin🦩Boldaji (@justinboldaji) August 4, 2025
“If you pull it out of an acoustic guitar, you put a piano there, and it works: it’s a good song. You pull it out of the piano, you put it on the harp – it’s still working. You take it out of the harp, you sing it a capella – it’s still working. It’s a good song!”
He continued: “Now, Home’ has been covered multiple times, different things. Some of them are hits, like actual hit songs. Some guy takes it from baritone, puts it in falsetto… you know, the one that went viral – Edith Whiskers, shoutout to whatever that is. That went viral.”
Ebert then went on to call out fellow stomp clappers Of Monsters and Men and The Lumineers, claiming both bands had copied Magnetic Zeros’ hits.
“By the way, ” he said, “we were the first to do the stomp and clap fuckin’ folk pop thing to the point where The Lumineers, they sought out one of our co-producers […] and were like, ‘Hey, do that Edward Sharpe thing for us’.”
“For real, that’s a real story. Of Monsters & Men, they got our album before they ever made an album because our agent was their manager, and she showed it to them and they basically got so close to ‘Home’ that we almost sued them.
“They were doing Apple commercials and I was getting calls saying, ‘Congratulations’. That’s how closely people started doing this.”
Rounding off his thoughts, he clarified that the song was not a “good recording”, but rather “a good song”.
“But it not being a good recording is what I love about [it],” Ebert said. “It’s like a moment. We recorded it on tape, we didn’t even know how to record on tape, it sounds like it’s made in some muffled garage.
“I wanted to spread the porous happenstance incidentalism of Edward Sharpe. Instead, what I spread was stomp claps taken and recorded better, and that’s depressing. But other than that, ‘Home’ is apparently a good song.”
Meanwhile, Of Monsters And Men have announced a new album called ‘All Is Love And Pain In The Mouse Parade’. Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros’ fourth and final studio record, ‘PersonA’, arrived in 2016.