Sitting on the sofa of their north London management offices a few days out from the release of third album Boys These Days, Sports Team’s drummer Al Greenwood is showing us the hefty bruise slowly making its presence known on her leg — the result not of a particularly aggressive night behind the kit, but of being repeatedly, voluntarily pelted with paintballs by fans.
Having reached the top three with both of their previous records, 2020’s Mercury-nominated debut Deep Down Happy and 2022’s Gulp!, the stunt was a gleefully ridiculous and very on-brand means of hawking more album pre-sales: buy five records and take your shot at a band member. “I thought it was gonna be quite Marina Abramovic, some critique and comment on the music industry, but it just felt very painful and debasing,” Greenwood deadpans. Guitarist Rob Knaggs cheerfully pipes up: “I guess that’s the critique and comment!”
Since emerging at the tail end of the 2010s amid a UK guitar music landscape then dominated by post-punk bands like Idles and Fontaines DC — angry young artists putting overt politics and poetry very purposefully to the fore — Sports Team have offered something of an alternative to all that. They’re still socially conscious and smart; most of the band met while studying at Cambridge University. But their sense of humour and readiness for antics takes its cues more from the schools of Britpop and Parklife-era Blur — a time when bands were Technicolor and fun, winking at the ridiculousness of the whole operation in plain sight.
Now three albums in, it’s something that feels less of an anomaly. “We started releasing music and playing in a world that was quite reserved and earnest and very cool, and now every band that’s successful has to be extroverted and open to a certain degree,” suggests frontman Alex Rice. “You look at bands like The Last Dinner Party and Wet Leg and how they portray themselves; I think it’s a lot closer to the way that we did on our first album than the bands we were playing with at the time.”
Both of those bands, in fact, have previous with Sports Team. The Last Dinner Party were fans who would regularly turn up at their early shows; Wet Leg supported them in 2021 when they headlined Brixton Academy. But it makes sense that the group — completed by guitarist Henry Young, bassist Oli Dewdney and keyboard player Ben Mack — would find their indie lineage in such a way. Central to the operation from the beginning has been an emphasis on creating a world for their fans, via a communal band-fan WhatsApp group or by putting on an annual party bus jolly to Margate, that feels like the antithesis of the current trend for hyper-online, parasocial artist relationships.
“If you’re a massive fan of something and you go deep on it, it feels like the opposite of doom scrolling,” suggests Knaggs. “It’s back to the point of the paintballing — which I obviously hated,” Greenwood caveats. “It’s about doing something that’s a bit more interesting, that involves people. Whereas with TikTok it feels so fleeting and transactional.”
It’s into this conversation that Boys These Days arrives. An album that addresses the endless scroll of modern life, where “you wake up and have 18,000 insane separate narratives hitting you before you’ve got out of bed,” says chief lyricist Knaggs, beneath its hook-laden indie exploits lies a catalogue of whip-smart social commentary.
Head to Space is about the excess of billionaires; the album’s title track questions nostalgia fetishists by “inhabiting the mindset of the most Daily Mail-reading, scaremongering personalities”, while Bang Bang Bang is a cowboy western about gun violence. “I got no problem with nobody / He had no business in my drive,” Rice parodies over rootin’ tootin’ guitars and a galloping chorus.
We got asked if we wanted to do primetime Fox News... Then as soon as we shared some information about stopping gun violence in the US they didn’t want to come anymore
The track was already written when Sports Team came face to face with the issue on tour in America at the tail end of last year. Setting off for their first show, they were robbed at gunpoint in the Bay area of California; soon, they found themselves embroiled in the middle of a political battleground. “You had the Left-wing press coming at you with the anti-gun angle which obviously we did the press for, and then suddenly you get the Right coming at you,” explains Rice. “We got asked if we wanted to do primetime Fox News the next day, so I was like, ‘Yeah alright!’ They were sending this Fox-mobile down 10 hours from LA, and then as soon as we shared some information about stopping gun violence in the US they just turned the car around and didn’t want to come anymore.”
I wonder if we will get turned away. People are getting turned away for nothing
Having also recently created a line of merch in aid of Trans Lifeline, The Immigrant Legal Resource Centre and immigrant rights charity CHIRLA, showing a red Trump hat on fire with the lyric “It’s all just lies, lies, lies” from their 2020 single Here’s the Thing, the band are aware they might not be in favour when it comes to border patrol right now. “[That T-shirt] didn’t feel like a crazy statement, but I wonder if we will get turned away,” Knaggs muses. “People are getting turned away for nothing.”
Their future US touring possibilities are, however, nowhere near as precarious as those of Kneecap. “It’s that classic floodgate thing, at what point do you draw the line and how do you draw the line?” asks Greenwood of the response from certain event promoters to pull the Irish band from their line-up. “How far do you wanna dig into the lyrics of what is being spoken about by the artists that you’re booking?” Rice pipes up: “I find it amazing as a story. Someone said it was like if punk bands like the Sex Pistols had been criticising Eisenhower, that’s how far back it is when Kneecap do a ‘f*** Thatcher’. I think it’s a very genuine place for them and they grew up in Belfast, but it gets a bit lame when politicians are trying to wade in about a Glastonbury line-up.”
A naturally funny gang who bounce off each other with the easy wit and camaraderie of people who’ve spent far too long trapped in tour buses together over the past decade, Sports Team have made it through to album three because there’s evident substance nestled just beneath the silliness. Greenwood co-founded the Inmotion Collective as a way to help champion access for women into sport, while the band have worked regularly with the Music Venue Trust, supporting grassroots spaces across the country. As a band that rose through the ranks of the UK live circuit, creating a word of mouth buzz the old school way, they’re keenly aware of exactly what could be lost.
“It’s just very different for bands because you need a specific set of venues and it costs a lot to get your instruments around. I actually feel pretty positive about stuff like TikTok because it’s a democratic space for music — it’s hell, but what you put in you tend to get out,” says Rice. “It’s bands and this kind of music that will go rather than pop stars and bedroom singer-songwriters.”
“It’s so odd that [guitar music] is thriving despite the lack of funding. Maybe that’s it, maybe they go, ‘Well, we’ve done f*** all for 20 years and it’s doing great, so let’s keep doing f*** all and see how it goes …’” Knaggs jokes grimly.
The future might look precarious, but if there’s a band ready to pull their socks up and do whatever it takes to keep merrily trucking on, it’s Sports Team. With release week now here, no amount of bruised body parts will stop them on the campaign trail. “This week is the ‘Clinton kissing babies’ week,” grins Rice. “You give up on any shred of being a credible musician and just start selling.” Perversely, however, the opposite is true. Sports Team might be willing to “monetise every element of [their] lives” in the pursuit of greatness (or at least a good gag), but they’ve got their priorities firmly in the right place. Far from selling out, we’re fully buying in.
Sports Team’s new album Boys These Days is out now. The band are on tour and play the 100 Club on July 18 (sold out - join the waiting list)
Sports Team’s playlist
PPJ - Dropi Dropa
“A trip to Rio carnival via France.”
Mary in the Junkyard - Drains
“Three lovely people who supported us on our last UK tour.”
Water from Your Eyes - Buy My Product
“There are no happy endings.”
