Bio

Britain’s most exciting breakthrough band of recent years, Sports Team, share their electrifying new single ‘The Game’, lifted from new album Gulp! Out 22nd July via Island Records. As premiered last night by Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio 6 Music, ‘The Game’, which has already become a fan live favourite, critiques the mentality of ignoring bad things happening in the world while you’re comfortable in your own personal circumstances. Coming on like the Pixies raised on a diet of English new wave, ‘The Game’ comes complete with a video starring cult 70s punk legend John Otway as a twisted game show host, seeing frontman Alex Rice put through a series of surreal trials.

 

“Ah yeah, that’s the game! Life’s hard but I can’t complain!” 

 

“It’s a mantra for a ‘nation of landlords’” the band explain of ‘The Game’s’ darkly ironic lyrics. “Something to mutter to yourself behind the electric gates as the world burns around you. It’s that bunkered, “island mentality”, where someone has allowed themselves to believe that the news is what happens to other people.”

 

Sports Team are Alex Rice (lead vocals), Rob Knaggs (rhythm guitar + vocals), Henry Young (lead guitar), Oli Dewdney (bass), Al Greenwood (drums) and Ben Mack (keyboard + percussion). Formed in 2016, the band released two EPs Winter Nets and Keep Walking! before sharing their debut album Deep Down Happy in June 2020 to widespread critical acclaim, praised by The Times for their “indomitable spirit and a refusal to take things too seriously” and The Guardian for their “sharply observational lyrics skewering the mores of suburbia”.

 

New album Gulp!, out this summer, houses Sports Team’s most assured and invigorating work to date, and is available to pre-order now on vinyl, CD & cassette from the band’s webstore. Gulp! follows Sports Team’s 2020 Mercury Prize nominated debut album Deep Down Happy, which charted at #2 in the UK’s Official Charts, achieving the biggest vinyl sales for a debut British artist in 2020.

 

Sports Team’s vivid vignettes of modern Britain and inspections of the follies, foibles and frustrations of youth have earned them an impassioned fanbase, a real community who come together at the band’s infamously electrifying live shows, including a sold out headline date at Brixton Academy last November.