Sports Team – Boys These Day
Today, UK’s best guitar band, Sports Team released their third studio album, Boys These Days.
A witty and insightful examination of modern life, exploring the dissonance of our social media feeds that unleash an endless cycle upon us. One of porn, tragedy, war, violence, sex, money, inspirational quotes. No narrative. No unifying myth. Just “the churn” as Sports Team term it.
The album also marks a major sonic shift for the renowned British band, amalgamating raucous indie rock, Brit pop, with disparate inspiration from the glossy 80s studio pop of Roxy Music, Elvis Costello and Prefab Sprout. The band share their innate ability to blend seemingly contradictory imagery and musical elements to create unique worlds that insightfully refracted our times.
Sports Team made a name for themselves in the US for all the wrong reasons in 2024 when they were robbed at gunpoint 15 mins into their headline tour. This will be a long distant memory for this rising indie-rock band, who also announced they will return to the US in September 2025 for their biggest US tour yet, opening for Brit pop icons, Supergrass with dates including Los Angeles’s The Palladium on Sep 5 and New York City’s Pier 17.
On the title track, Sports Team stated, “Boys these Day is Supergrass’ Alright if it was written by Ricard Littlejohn: “We are old, we are trapped, dentistry is a woke mind virus.” Ultimately it’s a song about the weaponisation of nostalgia, sung from the perspective of a self-pitying bigot. There’s this endless generational conflict between baby boomers who see themselves as stoic, hard-working and thrifty, and the feckless young with their creamy coffees and ungodly electronic cigarettes. I feel like that chorus line, “boys these days look like girls” could be taken from almost any generations’s equivalent of the Daily Mail. Beatles fans with bowl-cuts (“boys these days look like girls”). Hippies (“boys these days look like girls”). David Beckham (“boys these days look like girls”). Just Stop Oil. Etc. Etc. Etc. You can imagine some pub-bore in ancient Golgotha whipping it out at the crucifixion.”
Alex Rice, Oli Dewdney, Al Greenwood, Rob Knaggs, Ben Mack, and Henry Young, recorded Boys These Days with producer Matias Tellez (Girl In Red, CMAT, Gracie Abrams) in his Bergen Norwegian studio. They spent an extensive period working on the album. The band thrived with a day time recording schedule and outdoor subzero hiking exhibitions which nearly ended in disaster.
Sports Team tested out countless ideas including sci-fi-tinged tracks, City Pop experiments and even a divisive electro-clash direction that didn’t make the cut. What prevailed was a singular sound featuring dissonant studio effects, extravagant horn use, anchored by a bright core of pop hooks and sing-along choruses that will propel Sports Team to even bigger heights.
SHOW DATES
Sep 2 – Mexico City, MX – Metropolitan Theatre
Sep 5 – Los Angeles, CA – The Palladium
Sep 6 – San Francisco, CA – The Warfield
Sep 9 – Chicago, IL – The Riviera Theatre
Sep 11- New York, NY – Pier 17
Sep 12 – Boston, MA – MGM Music Hall
#sportsteam