Returning indie favourites Sports Team propel their artistry to new heights on third album, Boys These Days. The band take Wonderland through the body of work, track-by-track.
Ever feel like being young today means constantly chasing perfection — like you’re supposed to have the dream body, the dream job, the dream life, all while smiling through the chaos? Sports Team gets it. Their third studio album, Boys These Days, dives headfirst into the pressure cooker of modern youth, picking apart the myth of betterment with wit, grit, and a healthy dose of irony.
Produced by Matias Tellez (Girl In Red, CMAT, Gracie Abrams) in his Bergen studio, Boys These Days delivers a unique blend of indie rock, Britpop, and Sophisti-pop—imagine Blur and Wunderhorse having a very stylish, slightly chaotic baby. Here, the band dissects contemporary British life, questioning the curated chaos of social media. We’ve already had a taste of this through singles like “Sensible” and “Maybe When We’re 30,” both of which feature on the record.
Sports Team seem to be back better than ever, promising a stronger sense of maturity and a clear evolution in their songwriting—suggesting this could be their best work yet. With that in mind, they break down the album’s tracklist exclusively for Wonderland.
Listen to the album…
The band share an overarching view:
“I think being in a band is somewhere between collecting Katanas and “crypto guy” as far as respectable careers go. When you’re 23 everybody’s all fired up when you say your life is bowling about the country in a van playing shows. And then suddenly you’re 30. And then the intonation changes.
On our first two albums a lot of the music is from that first person perspective. With this one it was nice to move away from that a bit. It was quite cathartic. Doing more character based writing. Like playing sims. You can build an environment in which your sim thrives. Or you can put them in the pool and take the steps away. On album one we would have been referencing Pavement and The Clash. And then with this one it was China Crisis and Joe Jackson. On album two we were doing the record store shows. I think it was Bristol Rough Trade before the matinee show there. There was some sale-vinyl bin and Henry picked up some credible records. Big Thief or something like that and the person on the till was very excited ringing them up. Very approving. Then I brought up this £5 Joe Jackson record and they looked a bit sad. That was sort of the start of it all. I like to think of this record there someday. Nestled for eternity in the discount bin of Rough Trade Bristol next to Joe Jackson.”
Read through the track-by-track…
“Subaru”
As an opener Subaru is the sort of creative-agency render of the album. It’s the ad-spec of manhood. Fast cars. Artfully draped starlets. The smooth sounds of tenor saxophone. Album three feels like a big marker. The first album is raising the flag, the second is desperately trying to keep it flying, and the third is scaling the embassy walls and setting it on fire. So for me the idea of doing this record was wrapped a little bit around the idea of actually really playing with expectations. I like to punish myself by trawling Reddit forums sometimes so I think maybe we might have been too successful in this. But fuck em! Nobody wants to spend the rest of their life cos-playing themselves.
There’s this whole shadow album of Electroclash songs we did. We got to about 5 or six songs of that and then pivoted pretty hard. We’d play songs to the label and everybody was pretty unsure. There’s a sort of A&R scale where if they like something you’re going to be getting a paragraph of emojis. If they just reply with something like: “nice, sounds great” somebody’s losing their job. I was listening to the demos of those sessions today and I still quite like it. Our friend Murray was in the whole early 2000s London scene at Nag Nag Nag and he’d burn me these CDs of old compilations from that era that I’d drive around listening to.
“Boys These Days”
“Boys These Days” 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 generation’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.
“Moving Together”
In between the second album and getting into writing for this album we spent a bit of time in Portugal. We were in a little beach town, with two small bars, a load of stray dogs and a lifer expat who would walk about with the big bull whip and practice breaking the sound barrier. This song was the first that felt sort of interesting. It’s a song about the line where being together becomes less about wanting to spend your time with somebody, and more about just not being alone. I was listening a lot to World Party when we came back to the UK. And I think this had a bit of impact on the production of this one.
“Condensation”
This was originally going to be single one off the second album. So it’s been about for a long time. The live show has always been a big part of our band. I think shambolic is probably the best way to describe it. You want to generate the conditions for chaos. We’d go to see bands like Egyptian Hip Hop growing up and it was always right on the edge of collapse. I think we’re still figuring out how to do this properly live though. It’s not a natural “human pyramid” sort of song.
“Sensible”
“Sensible” is a song about the myth of betterment. “Go to the gym. Get ripped! Get rich! Get ahead!” I think being young now, it feels like you’re trapped in someone else’s nostalgia. Primed. Groomed. Glistening with youth and vigor. What for? Staving off the grim reaper with Haeckels face creams and expensive candles. Adopting the aesthetic of liberalism while running an air bnb empire, flying 10 times a year and working for Helsing AI.
“Bang Bang Bang”
We toured America a lot over the last few years. Go into a truckstop in a red state and there’ll be an AR-15 on a t-shirt. On a lighter. A bumper sticker. A stanley cup. A coffee bag. Gun violence is a billion dollar industry. At the heart of the song is a perversion of masculinity. The propaganda of manfluencers like Andrew Tate. Selling the idea that strength is a measure of your ability to cause pain. This song was written in 2023, so a long while before we got robbed, but it’s been pretty hard to disentangle it from that after the fact. When people talk about this song now, it’s sort of morphed into being the song we wrote after that San Francisco incident. Which it was not. It’s maybe a better image though. Sat in a motel room with a note book. A single manly tear tracking through the stubble.
“Planned Obsolescence”
When we were writing this song I was reading a Jon Savage book. He’s very into the invention of the teenager. His basic argument is that due to WW2 decimating the adult population teenagers suddenly had jobs, and buying power, and this leads to the whole world of teenage music and marketing and ultimately punk! I think now there’s this new holding pattern generation of 30 to 40 year olds, who maybe 20 years ago would be mortgaged up with careers and long term partners and two and a half children. Now though there’s this late adolescence. That “normal” sitcom suburban life is becoming unaffordable. So you replace growing up / family life with Jolenes. Small plates. Gorp core. The Spurstowe. Quiet quitting. Brat! That’s the sort of heart of Planned Obsolescence. This weird little song about feeling directionless and unable to meaningfully contribute to the world around you.
“Bonnie”
Was going for a sort of Bonnie and Clyde flashing-lights cop drama feel with this one. I picture it as a married couple driving off to Devon down the A303, and they haven’t spoken since the Mcdonalds before Stonehenge and it’s from the perspective of one of them just daydreaming that the silence isn’t a symptom of their dying marriage but because the car is bugged by the police.
“Head To Space”
A song about the temptation of thinking you can get out of your problems by spending 100 billion dollars on a giant penis surrogate to fly you to Mars. On Mars people will find you charming and laugh at your jokes and admire your well defined jawline.
“Maybe When We’re Thirty”
“Maybe When We’re Thirty” is the realisation that everything you were kicking against suddenly seems so appealing. The return to the shire. The parochial. The normal. The stable. After the pilgrimage through the alternatives, violence, hate etc etc, minor feuds about recycling and the timeless music of Philadelphia’s finest seem a pretty sweet combination. This is Bilbo Baggins’ final acceptance, at 80 on a cruise, that joy in life comes not from dying before you get old, but from outliving the haters.
“Don’t trust anyone over 30” – Jack Weinberg
