Even for a band prone to dressing up as toreadors on stage, life eventually gets very real indeed. No sooner had London indie rockers Sports Team written a song about America’s complex relationship with guns – the Smithsy skiffle rocker “Bang Bang Bang” – than they were victims of an armed robbery on the first day of their US tour last December. Within months of penning a biting fuzz-folk satire of Elon Musk’s ambitions to flee a burning Earth for Mars (“Head to Space”), they find he’s in the White House helping start the fire under America’s climate research cheques.
And just as they’re releasing a third album with an orchestral-pop title track that pillories the reactionary, anti-woke mindset (“boys these days look like girls… maybe what they need is a war”), Reform surges into the UK’s political vacuum and ahead in the polls. So stacked is Boys These Days with eerie premonition and pertinence, in fact, that you’re somewhat amazed not to come across a knockabout track called “New Yank Pope”.
