Sports Team Return With New Single 'Billy,' Announce September UK Tour
UK indie band Sports Team have released a new single, "Billy," described by songwriter Rob Knaggs as "a love letter to getting hammered in a carpeted pub on a Tuesday night." It's the band's first new material since last May's third album Boys These Days and its follow-up single "Medium Machine." Sports Team will also launch a UK tour of small venues, "DIY Alive," starting September 22 in Southampton and wrapping October 3 at EartH in London.
"Billy": tracked live at RAK Studios
According to NME, "Billy" keeps singer Alex Rice's soul-inflected melodic instincts but adds rougher textures and sharper-edged guitars, making it one of the band's loudest tracks since their 2020 debut Deep Down Happy.
"We tracked it live in the first weeks of early summer at RAK Studios with Seth Evans and Adele Phillips," Knaggs said. "It felt like getting back to how we made the first record. Fast, loose, loud."
In the lyrics, Rice sings "Fuck you billy / Where is this going," before the song pushes into a pub scene ahead of the chorus: "You know your dad's at the bar / He keeps ordering shots / The toilet lights are whiter than heaven."
DIY Alive UK tour dates
- September 22 — Southampton, The Brook
- September 23 — Oxford, The Bullingdon
- September 24 — Bristol, The Fleece
- September 25 — Liverpool, Arts Club Theatre
- September 26 — Blackpool, Bootleg Social
- September 27 — Edinburgh, La Belle Angele
- September 29 — Newcastle, Digital
- September 30 — Nottingham, Metronome
- October 3 — London, EartH
Where this fits with Boys These Days
Sports Team, a Mercury Prize-nominated band and NME 100 alumni, released their third album Boys These Days last May to a four-star NME review, which described the band as "flipping the increasingly divided narrative of the world and embracing humanity's childlike side."
The same review noted the album pushes further sonically than the band's earlier guitar-led work, but avoids the trap many indie peers fall into of simply "bolting synths on top" — staying closer instead to what they are at their core: a live band.