Boys These Days - Sports Team Album Review

Words: Ollie Hopewell

My first experience of Sports Team was hearing Margate played through a crappy Bluetooth speaker in a field on a scorching hot summer’s day, an experience enhanced by drinking slightly warm cans of discounted pre-mixed cocktails; while you could claim that this isn’t the optimal set up for hearing a band for the first time, I would staunchly argue that this is the peak listening experience for Sports Team. Alex Rice’s Mick Jagger-esque vocals, and dancing if you include live performances, and upbeat chimes of guitar had me hooked from the opening 20 seconds, therein beginning my love of the Cambridge-based band.

While Sports Team had yet to release their debut album, Deep Down Happy, at the time of my listening, they had already been touted for great things and had seemingly caught lightning in a bottle in terms of encapsulating and communicating a pseudo-nostalgic love of noughties British culture. The band’s latest album, Boys These Days, is only a fortification of these themes.

The album kicks off with well-received single I’m In Love (Subaru) which is very much the flagship track of the overall record. Opening with a swagger of saxophone, which is a reference to Bill Clinton of all people, and laying a groovy beat reminiscent of an 80s chart topper from the likes of Spandau Ballet. “Subaru” is an ode to nostalgia, a teenager’s perspective of adulthood and how cool it is to own a sportscar, namely a Subaru Impreza. If you’re after this album’s upbeat love song, you’ve found it.  

There’s a tongue-and-cheek approach that perforates everything that Sports Team do, and in this case it’s the sextet’s nod to a love of daytime TV either side of the album’s titular track Boys These Days, an on-the-nose critique of modern dating from the perspective of, I can only assume, a Gen X man written as a Folk-Pop ballad. Speaking of on-the-nose, the second reference to daytime TV comes in Moving Together, which directly samples the theme music from Coronation Street and cuts it with a percolating groove to serve up a line of Class-A Alt. Rock. Ben Mack eat your heart out.

We get a real taste of classic Sports Team in Condensation which would be at home on both their 2020 debut and their sophomore album Gulp!, the only difference being that frontman Alex Rice has only improved his already impressive vocal range since. Sensible shows the band’s most recent evolution and is reminiscent of David Bowie in his Thin White Duke phase while Rice’s lyrics, here more than anywhere else in the record, echo that of Anyways Era Alex Turner. The track that sticks out the most on the record, not necessarily in a negative way, is Planned Obsolescence; it’s a return of rhythm guitarist Rob Knaggs, who is usually resigned to backing vocals, taking vocal lead as he did on Lander, but this time we get a much more relaxed and tonally darker performance which fits well as the album’s mid-point.

Things get amped back up with my personal favourite cowboy-coded toe-tapper Bang Bang Bang, a track that invokes the slow and steady sound of a Johnny Cash classic while keeping a slightly camp Spaghetti Western feel, a mixture that creates the record’s earworm. Head to Space follows, a song that builds and builds from this Strokes-esque sound to a riot of noise before abruptly ending just as you start wanting more.

Alright, we get it. Sports Team are back doing what they do best, and they sound better than ever, but have they really shown off yet? Well yes, actually, but if you still need convincing then I’d have to point you to penultimate track Bonnie, a technically impressive reflection on the music industry in which Oli Dewdney’s thick basslines and Al Greenwood’s punchy drums lay a somewhat sinister tone. Greenwood also utilises her vocals on the solemn finale Maybe When We’re 30 an introspective ending to the latest project that climaxes with a Henry Young guitar solo that is simply sublime.

In Boys These Days, Sports Team have again improved upon their formula of real and rooted music as their ever-evolving sound has once more found its newest form; their most complete album to date mixes a multitude of tracks that display just how much they are capable of achieving, all whilst harking back to their original sound to keep their distinct sound fresh. It’s chaotic, as Sports Team often are, on your first listen, but once you step back to see the whole picture you can see that this is a self-sent love letter to what has been and what is yet to come.