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Even for a band prone to dressing up as toreadors on stage, life eventually gets very real indeed. No sooner had London indie rockers Sports Team written a song about America’s complex relationship with guns – the Smithsy skiffle rocker “Bang Bang Bang” – than they were victims of an armed robbery on the first day of their US tour last December. Within months of penning a biting fuzz-folk satire of Elon Musk’s ambitions to flee a burning Earth for Mars (“Head to Space”), they find he’s in the White House helping start the fire under America’s climate research cheques.
And just as they’re releasing a third album with an orchestral-pop title track that pillories the reactionary, anti-woke mindset (“boys these days look like girls… maybe what they need is a war”), Reform surges into the UK’s political vacuum and ahead in the polls. So stacked is Boys These Days with eerie premonition and pertinence, in fact, that you’re somewhat amazed not to come across a knockabout track called “New Yank Pope”.
The album’s main thematic thrust, though, is less topical, more generational. Where once rock bands pondered how to live as freely and decadently as possible in the short, speedy lifespan that rock’n’roll had chalked up for them, Sports Team face down their thirties singing about the new Millennial dream: security. “This is my planned obsolescence!” Alex Rice yowls on “Planned Obsolescence”, a kind of Modern Life is Rubbish take on “Once in a Lifetime”. It’s an open diary of the consumable modern consumer who’s little more than a “pointless device”; an online data clone, price-gouging opportunity and sucked-dry slave to someone else’s mortgage. The vivacious “Sensible”, a new wave homage imagining Jonathan Richman briefly fronting Razorlight, bewails the “sensibly numb” existence forced on the children of the eight-quid-pint age.
Summing up the album, the closing “Maybe When We’re 30” fantasises wistfully of the picket fence middle-aged family idyll that rock once aspired to drive a Harley Davidson through. “Maybe when we’re 30 we could get a dog,” Rice sings, dreaming of cul-de-sac bin disputes, Daily Telegraph subscriptions and – oh, brave new world – spare bedrooms, “Once a year we’ll go out and we’ll watch The War on Drugs.” As mocking as it reads, there’s little overt sarcasm to it. The joke, as ever, is on his rather than his parents’ generation.
If Sports Team’s life options seem limited, their sonic ones vastly overcompensate. Boys These Days – in step with recent records by fellow leading alt-rock lights Fontaines DC and Wolf Alice – is blind to restraints of era or genre, a work of invigorating emancipation rock. A big Aztec Camera sax rock tune about classic Eighties cars and oversexed movie stars: “I’m in Love (Subaru)” rubs up against symphonic disco, Joy Division atmospheres, Britpop, Daisy Age hip-hop and Primal Scream funk country. The title track imagines ELO orchestrating a Squeeze classic, “Condensation” is pure Celtic soul Dexys and “Bonnie” is stuck, brilliantly, in sleazy Depeche Mode.
Speckled about, you’ll find dashes of prog flute, Morricone drama and an acid jazz interpretation of the Coronation Street theme. It’s so stylistically polygamous and up for anything that they should probably be repeating it endlessly on late-night Channel 4. One listen is to hear the hemmed-in burst out. I predict an art pop riot.
