Each month, Consequence highlights a rising artist with our recurring characteristic collection CoSign. For Could 2025, we’re smiling via dystopia with the British group Sports activities Crew and their glorious third album, Boys These Days.
It’s laborious sufficient for a British six-piece band to pack up their gear and embark on a US tour; it’s even more durable once they’re robbed at gunpoint on the primary day of the trek. That is what occurred to Sports activities Crew in December 2024, who encountered masked vandals smashing the home windows of their tour van exterior a Starbucks in Vallejo, California. Nobody obtained harm, and regardless of shedding some treasured private gadgets, they nonetheless had their musical devices. “They’ll take our Nintendo Switches however they’ll by no means take our capability to play rock songs about motorways,” the band wrote on social media.
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5 months later, Sports activities Crew guitarist, songwriter, and lyricist Rob Knaggs displays on the sudden silver lining. “Our overwhelming expertise of America is simply how pleasant individuals are,” he tells Consequence over Zoom. “After we have been robbed, we obtained so many messages from mums within the native space who’d be like, ‘Oh, my son’s gone to school. He’s obtained a guitar within the wall of his bed room. I can convey it to you in case you want it.’ That’s been our expertise of America normally.”
The theft was a small blip on a quite intensive album marketing campaign for Sports activities Crew’s third report, Boys These Days, out on Friday, Could twenty third. Introduced again in July of 2024, the discharge has been a very long time coming for Knaggs and the band, who’re rounded out by vocalist Alex Rice, drummer Al Greenwood, guitarist Henry Younger, bassist Oli Dewdney, and keyboardist Ben Mack. It’s been so lengthy for the reason that album was recorded and accomplished at Matias Téllez’s studio in Norway that the even the sociopolitical panorama has modified; particularly within the US, a spot that lots of Boys These Days’ characters name residence.
The band by no means supposed it, however that jarring prison encounter within the US, combined with the heat and delight of releasing a brand new album, speaks to the contradictory coronary heart of Boys These Days. By all means, this album is brilliant, boisterous, and a boatload of enjoyable. It’s additionally utterly insane, suffering from spiky characters who can’t cease complaining, contradicting themselves, threatening violence, or expressing their brokeness. Sports activities Crew ship biting commentary on societal collapse via songs that sound, remarkably, like celebrations. They cloak lyrics about gun violence, generational disconnect, and cultural decay in glistening, ’80s-inspired manufacturing and hovering melodies, with Rice serving as their charismatic preacher.
The pivot to a sound that evokes extra, in addition to the grandiosity of Prefab Sprout and Roxy Music, is a subversive departure from their earlier, extra easy sound. “Punk and post-punk within the UK has grow to be a form of cliché of itself,” Knaggs says. “It’s grow to be this t-shirt empire of radicalism, if you recognize what I imply. It’s that City Outfitters sloganeering the place as a result of it’s grow to be so absorbed culturally, you sort of swap off. So it was fairly enjoyable pondering, ‘What does it imply to sing these lyrics that we did in on the primary album with guitars that referenced The Conflict, however as an alternative of utilizing that palette, you begin utilizing these very clichéd ’80s sounds?’”