THE SUBSTANCE AND THE SILLINESS OF SPORTS TEAM

After being robbed at gunpoint last year, indie's funniest band are back with a joyous new record, encouraging fans to paintball them and leading the rebirth of smart guitar music.

- By Lisa Wright

Sitting on the sofa of their north London management offices a few days out from the release of third album Boys These Days, Sports Team's drummer Al Greenwood is showing us the hefty bruise slowly making its presence known on her leg - the result not of a particularly aggressive night behind the kit, but of being repeatedly, voluntarily pelted with paintballs by fans.

Having reached the top three with both of their previous records, 2020's Mercury-nominated debut Deep Down Happy and 2022's Gulp!, the stunt was a gleefully ridiculous and very on-brand means of hawking more album pre-sales: buy five records and take your shot at a band member. "I thought it was gonna be quite Marina Abramovic, some critique and comment on the music industry, but it just felt very painful and debasing," Greenwood deadpans. Guitarist Rob Knaggs cheerfully pipes up: "I guess that's the critique and comment!"

Since emerging at the tail end of the 2010s amid a UK guitar music landscape then dominated by post-punk bands like Idles and Fontaines DC - angry young artists putting overt politics and poetry very purposefully to the fore - Sports Team have offered something of an alternative to all that. They're still socially conscious and smart; most of the band met while studying at Cambridge University. But their sense of humour and readiness for antics takes its cues more from the schools of Britpop and Parklife-era Blur - a time when bands were Technicolor and fun, winking at the ridiculousness of the whole operation in plain sight.