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May 20, 2025 Issue #74 - The Protest Issue with Kathleen Hanna and Bartees Strange By Jimi Arundell

Expect the unexpected, as post-punk pranksters Sports Team return with their third record, Boys These Days, and it’s their most strange and subversive offering yet. Drawing heavily from ’80s New Wave, blue-eyed soul, and classic art pop, the former Mercury Prize nominees kick off with “I’m In Love (Subaru).” The lead single is a wry pisstake of macho commodity fetishism which could easily be a lost Spandau Ballet deep-cut, as Alex Rice croons over cheesy sexy saxophone. Both “Sensible” and the title track have a slight Thin White Duke-era Bowie twang to them, “Moving Together” has strange echoes of the theme tune for the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street and they’ve even chucked in a Spaghetti Western-influenced track, “Bang Bang Bang,” for good measure.

Bonkers it may be, but Boys These Days is a near-perfect pastiche of the naff hopes and dreams of an ever increasingly irrelevant Middle England plus the dangerous extremes of the online age. Their kaleidoscopic songwriting and shotgun use of styles mirror the confusion of just how weird the world has become, and somehow their surrealism makes sense of it all. (www.sportsteamband.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10