Sports Team

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Sports Team’s third album ‘Boys These Days’ cements their place at the heart of a great English songwriterly tradition, while marking a huge leap forward in the band’s sonic trajectory. Taking influence from the eccentric English maximalism of Roxy Music, World Party, Prefab Sprout and XTC, it’s a bold record that fully realises the promise of the Mercury Prize nominated six-piece. While the band’s first two albums Deep Down Happy (2020) and Gulp! (2022) – both of which debuted in the Top 3 of the UK’s official charts - were recorded in the gaps between a punishing tour schedule, ‘Boys These Days’ was the product of two years of studio work, allowing the band to fully realise their ambitions. The album pulses with a hedonistic anxiety. “Not playing live was like two years in a convent” says vocalist Alex Rice, explaining live shows become “a high you can’t get anywhere else.” Having gone from London’s backroom pub scene to the 5000-capacity Brixton Academy in less than 12 months, Sports Team built a reputation as one of the country's best live acts. It’s no surprise that 20 months on from their last British show, Rice missed that chaotic communion with their fans. You can hear the yearning for live stages in the album’s sweat-slicked physicality. Picking up the mantle of Prefab Sprout’s ‘Cars and Girls’, first single ‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’ turns the lounge-crooner schmatziness up to 11. Taking cues from city-pop icon Mariya Takeyuchi and Elvis Costello, the titular Subaru is set up as an icon of naive romance. It’s the adolescent dream of adult-life. Where love is as effortless as Brian O'Conner’s cornering, and artfully draped starlets pine somewhere in the soft-focus distance. “Feels like driving a throne / immaculate leather and chrome… leaving sparks from the chrome / where it drags on the road” The bright shine of the capitalist car dream can never quite hide the cynical sting though. The car is bright and timeless only with “history dead in the trunk”. The later allusion to Bill Clinton’s saxophone-wielding Arsenio Hall appearance feels pointed. In an age where Andrew Tate sells misogyny wrapped in the capped veneers of super-cars and skintight suits, it’s a timely reminder of the rot that lurks behind the £5000 smile. Throughout the album vocalist Alex Rice tilts at the windmills of modern living. From the adolescent dream-fufilment of a shining red Subaru Impreza, to the greed of a nation of landlords; the album’s lyrical themes are a baggage carousel of the sins of 21st century life, washed clean in the blood of David Beckham. From dog-whistle “proper binmen-ism,” to Chianti, remote fucking and Fred Again, it’s a love letter to a life blown apart by nothing-much-in-particular. As comfortable in esoteric obscurity as he is the everyday symbols of new-build suburbia, lyricist Robert Knaggs channels Paddy McAloon and Kurl Wallinger throughout the album. It’s hard to imagine any of his contemporaries folding the late capitalist-nightmare of “planned obsolescence,” Brooklyn Beckham, and “a crisp Chianti in a lightly frosted glass” into 40 minutes of new wave pop. But with Sports Team the contradictions are all part of the package. The album deals with the vacant symbols of 21st life. “Where love is a tax-write off, and the moon is just a great big strip-mine in the sky,” Knaggs explains. It’s a soundtrack for “the age of obsolescence. The promise of a shiny new life, with the breakdown already built into it.”  Despite its themes, the album never feels dour. Packing its punches with the effortlessly sticky melodies of guitarists Henry Young and Knaggs, Ben Mack’s bar-room piano, and the one-two punch of drummer and bassist Al Greenwood and Oli Dewdney, the hooks are relentless. The band spent January 2024 in near total darkness in the home of Death Metal, Bergen, Norway, with producer Matthias Tellez (Girl in Red, CMAT,) emerging with their brightest record to date. It marks the beginning of a new era for the band who, after releasing their first two albums with Island Records, have signed with Distiller Records (they remain with Bright Antenna in the US). Fragmentary, hyper-real and dissolving faster than the sticky-tape surgery of hedonism can hold it - at its heart ‘Boys These Days’ is an ode to a half-remembered normalcy, trapped between the seductive power, and clear danger of the myth. A classified ad in comic sans: “If it’s what you need, it works for me” Sports Team are: Alex Rice (Vocals) Robert Knaggs (Lyrics, backing vocals, Rhythm Guitar) Henry Young (Lead Guitar, Lap Steel) Oli Dewdney (Bass) Al Greenwood (Drums) Ben Mack (Synth, Piano & Percussion) —- -

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23,00 € zzgl. Gebühren