“You see so many narratives all day,” says Rob Knaggs, guitarist from Sports Team. “You wake up, see a video about The Oscars and then you go on The Guardian and read about Ukraine and then you go on Instagram and see someone's dog. There are endless clashing images and at some point it just becomes a weird background noise to your life.”
It's this combination – the absurdity of modern life, mixed with bleakness and humour – that sits at the heart of Gulp!, the much anticipated second record from the six-piece rock band Sports Team. It's a pumped up, endlessly wry album, which begs the question: how do we give life meaning? Self destruction? One last party before the apocalypse? “You're constantly striving for some kind of model of living,” says frontman Alex Rice. “I think a lot of people grapple with that at the moment: if you're young and living in the UK, what do you tie meaning to?.”
A lot has changed for Sports Team since they first burst onto the scene like the scrappy love children of Pavement and Pulp. In late 2020 they were nominated for a Mercury Prize for their debut Deep Down Happy. It marked a major moment for the band, who before then had primarily been known for their boisterous live shows, zealous young fans and hair-trigger sense of mischief.
They didn't waste any time after that – holing themselves up in random parts of the country (Devon, Bath, Rob's basement studio in Margate) – writing, rehearsing, and thrashing it all out for what would eventually become Gulp! – with production from Dave McCracken (The Stone Roses, Beyonce, Depeche Mode). As with their first, the tracks began with Rob “sat on Logic with a guitar” before being taken to the rehearsal studio with the full band “at which point the lyrics often change.” Alex would then spread his easy, droll charisma over the tracks and they'd evolve again; pop songs injected with their trademark cynicism and humour.
While their debut grappled with the mundanity of middle England, Gulp! comes at you from a different angle entirely. The band isn't in their hometowns anymore and now spends a lot of time on the road and living the band life. “We were writing about our experience growing up, commuter towns in your early 20s and that sort of existence – it feels really novel for that period of your life,” says Rob of their debut. “It reflected what we were doing and how we felt.” The second was written after a period of intense change and evolution – for both them as a band and the world at large.
Musically, Gulp! veers away from the US alt-rock sound of their earlier music and towards something more emotive, with feeling – with dashes of XTC, The Bangles, and their obsession, Bryan Ferry. Whether it's the catchy, circular sound of “Dig” (not a reference to the film), the poppy and almost theatrical “The Drop” (a clear nod to Ferry's “Let's Stick Together”) or the morbid yet upbeat post-punk track “Getting Better,” Sports Team have crafted a tongue-in-cheek soundtrack to the end times (“Sometimes what you fear never comes / And sometimes what you fear never leaves,” spits Alex on “Unstuck.”)
Despite the band's cynicism towards the world at large, there are some things Sports Team feels excited and hopeful about. “This does sound soppy and earnest, but playing in a band does feel otherworldly,” says Alex. “You're part of a genuine community, something that's bigger than yourself and I'd never felt like before [this] – you're going on stage and you're having that night together.”
