Press Play: Sports Team

Sports Team is a six-piece band from London that are dead set on making something ferocious out of the mundane. The band members met while studying at Cambridge and bonded over their discontent with suburbia and middle England. Sonically, Sports Team crafts crisp, reckless tunes that recall artists like Franz Ferdinand or even some of the early work of Arctic Monkeys. Their soundscape is wrapped up in an energy that feels untamed yet still buoyant– even when delivering the most biting lines, frontman Alex Rice keeps a good-natured humor.

After two delays due to the pandemic, Sports Team finally released their debut album Deep Down Happy early last month. All twelve tracks live up to the growing anticipation with the band refusing to hold any punches. Opening track “Lander” reels off a list of out-of-touch British towns that they have lived in. On the furious track “Here’s The Thing”, Rice delivers each line with full theatrical commitment, taking on UK politicians and Britain’s most hypocritical slogans before labeling it all “lies, lies lies.”

The tracks on Deep Down Happy feel like their ultimate goal is to get an entire crowd of teenagers moshing by the first song of the set. Tracks “Fishing” and “Here It Comes Again” are anthemic, and demand to be shouted. Beneath this intensity, there is an underlying elation that makes Sports Team so fun. The tribalism that Sports Team uses in their approach to indie music establishes their sound’s unyielding straightforwardness and overall importance in the current indie zeitgeist.