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. “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.”
“For me at 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.”
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