Your friend out for drinks… unsolicited political opinion… betting ad… 15 seconds of a pop music video… ad for impractical cleaning accessory… different friends on holiday… life-affirming yet oxymoronic quote… Eddie Murphy tapping his forehead… influencer you don’t remember following…  the guy looking at another girl who isn’t his girlfriend…  transfer rumor for a team you don’t support… “we’re just normal men…” Welcome to the churn.

With much of what we consume shorn of context, juxtaposed beside unconnected messages as a billion different fingers scroll through ever-so-slightly different feeds, to make a work of art embracing 21st-century culture Sports Team have dived into the churn at the deep end. After their first two, Top 3 records – the Mercury Prize-nominated ‘Deep Down Happy’ (2020) and ‘Gulp!’ (2022) – skillfully charted individual thoughts and feelings, for new album ‘Boys These Days’, the London-based six-piece have taken a wider view. Allying a seer-like lyrical insight with the band’s most dynamic musical performances to date, Sports Team are piercing the content abyss. 

A “carousel of 21st-century sins”, this witty and insightful examination of modern life is both a critique and a celebration of its times. Yes, ‘Boys These Days’ takes aim at everything from advertising hype to relationship dysfunction, stationed at the point where the digital tide crashes onto IRL shores, but their perspective is fuelled by immersion in that landscape as Sports Team are scrolling along with the rest of us.  

“Looking back at the finished record, if there is a thread to the album, it is that dissonance of modern life,” explains guitarist and lyricist Robert Knaggs. “You wake up in the morning, and by the time you have your breakfast, you’ve scrolled through 8000 different narratives that have no cohesive thread. As you go through Instagram Stories, Twitter, or whatever, you get an insane combination of things like porn, tragedy, war, violence, sex, money, inspirational quotes… there's no narrative anymore, no unifying myth. You’re in the churn and there is no thread guiding you back through the labyrinth.”

Rather than being overwhelmed by our seemingly inevitable encounter with a social media minotaur, the band took inspiration from the purposely dissonant clashes behind British Pop  Art of the 1960s, plus influence from musical artists like Roxy Music, Elvis Costello, and Prefab Sprout whose ability to blend seemingly contradictory imagery and musical elements allowed them to create unique worlds that insightfully refracted their times.

This wonderfully nuanced vision was able to emerge organically as Sports Team enjoyed an extended writing period ahead of recording ‘Boys These Days’. After playing their last UK shows two years ago, the band coalesced in their rehearsal studio. “We were probably in there for a lot longer than we anticipated because we wanted a break. We thought we would be writing for a couple of months but we were there for ages!” recalls Knaggs, revealing how this allowed the group to explore around 50 song ideas, including sci-fi-tinged tracks, City Pop experiments and even a divisive electro-clash direction (“That one was so unpopular with our bassist Oli,” laughs Knaggs “He hated those songs so much!”), before a series of songs sharing a vision that would anchor ‘Boys These Days’ emerged.

“For me a least, you don’t want to try to write a concept album, it’s a nightmare place to wind up lyrically, so we didn’t sit down with a concept in our minds at the start,” continues Knaggs of how the immersion in the churn suggested itself naturally. “By not thinking too hard or trying to be too curatorial with the lyrics, just allowing yourself to write about what you’re seeing every day, we ended up with a group of tracks that reflected the daily mayhem around us.”

The first single taken from the album, ‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’, reveals how this approach allowed the band to hit top gear. Over smoldering saxophones that evoke the freedom of a neon highway, what starts out as a love song soon hand-break turns into a dissection of aspirational hype, as concepts of teenage rebellion, freedom and love are shamelessly enslaved to a consumerist dream. “The song captures that tension between those glossy inanimate objects you can project any desire onto versus all the stuff that creeps in behind it,” explains vocalist Alex Rice. “It should be a very uncomplicated love song, talking about cars and how people perceive their relationships, but with humanity, nothing is ever that simple.”    

With Rice’s seductive croons revealing the depth Sports Team have gained with this new album, ‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’ also serves as a great demonstration of the band’s collaboration with producer Matthias Tellez (Girl in Red, CMAT). Though based in Bergen, the birthplace of black metal, the sessions at Tellez’s studio at the start of 2024 saw Sports Team create their brightest and most beguiling record yet.

“Matthias’ approach was to focus on getting the right energy, spirit and emotion into our performance. He said, ‘Don’t worry modern editing software has got your back’ which meant we could really try things because there was never any pressure to nail something on a single take,” explains Rice. “So he created a real atmosphere of freedom for us. It definitely felt different and I'm a lot happier with my performance on this album than I have felt about the first two.”

Guitarist Henry Young agrees the time in Norway was transformative for the band. 

“It was a slightly surreal working process,” he recalls. “I’m not sure if it’s a Scandinavian thing, but the working day was 10 till 4 rather than late nights and all hours. So it was wildly different to what we’d done before.”

“I think it produced a better quality,” bass player Oli Dewdney adds of the distinctly un-satanic sessions. “The quality of life was certainly better. And you can’t afford to go out drinking, which helps.” Yet the enforced clean living did not stop Sports Team from getting their hands dirty as they delved into the churn, and ‘Boys These Days’ title track even inadvertently takes inspiration from refuse collection.

“Did you see that ‘Who Remembers Proper Binmen?’ article that went viral a few years ago? It was looking at all these Facebook groups where people reminisce about things that are a bit pathetic and probably didn’t happen. Like, ‘Who remembers playing in the street and if you broke your leg you’d just have a Twix and go right back to school?’ That kind of stuff,” grins Knaggs of the swaggering track’s satirical inception. Although like all the best songs, ‘Boys These Days’ sees it from both sides. Clearly, there is deserved disdain for generations taking ownership of wars they were born after, but this scowl is mixed with an admiring glance for the artificial certainty they’ve adopted in the wake of the churn. “I have that little bit of jealousy, in a sense, in the way they really buy into a narrative and an identity,” continues Knaggs. “They possess a surety in the way they think about the world. Yes, they are tilting at modern windmills but as much as Don Quixote is a ridiculous figure, there's something inspiring about him too. What he's doing is ridiculous, he’s a clown but his belief is pure – and theirs is too.”

The spacey, deceptively chilled ‘Moving Together’ explores obsessions of a different kind. Not only does it start by musically quoting the national fixation that is the Coronation Street theme, (“ITV have a percentage on the song now!”) the track raises that shared concern of whether it is true love or proximity that is keeping couples together – and whether one is truly better than the other – before the Western-tinged ‘Bang Bang Bang' weighs up the true romance of the eternally peripatetic Kerouac-esque loner against supposedly selling out and settling down… reaching a not necessarily expected conclusion. 

Not that Sports Team get too cozy. Sparkling with a burning, bright core of pop hooks and sing-alongs, ‘Sensible’ takes a swipe at a catalog of vacant symbols of 21st-century life where, as Knaggs puts it, “love is a tax-write off, and the moon is just a great big strip-mine in the sky. This is the age of obsolescence. The promise of a shiny new life, with a breakdown already built in.” Meanwhile, with its Stones-y riffs and undeniable hip-moving powers ‘Condensation’ propels Sports Team into rock’n’roll’s fast lane. 

“‘Condensation’ is a good nod to the previous stuff we’ve done,” argues Rice, reminding us that with all of ‘Boys These Days’ innovations, the band haven’t lost sight of the passion their audience inspires. “With its riffs, it will be a good 'un live. Recording it reminded us we were a live band. We’ve still got a young fan base compared to a lot of guitar bands and when we play live I often look into the crowd and see myself when I was first going to gigs. I feel that’s a little bit unique in the UK guitar world at the moment, which is brilliant, so I think they’ll really like this song.”

‘Boys These Days’ will ensure this uniqueness continues. Not only does its musically dexterous songs give the band further ammunition onstage, but by making a record that tries to make sense of its times while still being very much part of them, Sports Team have made an album destined to forge an enduring connection with its listeners.  

“Some of our references, whether musically or in the words, will be a way for people to get into the album as it will give them something to react to,” suggests Knaggs of the ambition underlining ‘Boys These Days’. “It’s like that idea of Brian Eno’s, that pop music is not just about the music, it’s about creating worlds and letting people live in them. There is a lot of truth in that when I look at the artists we all love, they create a different dimension you can exist in.”

With ‘Boys These Days’, Sports Team have done that too, reframing our modern era into something much more glamorous, thrilling — making us all proper rock’n’roll stars in the process. 

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) and Ben Mack (synths, piano & percussion)