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When they burst onto the UK scene with their ‘Winter Nets’ (2018) and ‘Keep Walking!’ (2019) EPs – and stayed there – Sports Team proved that you can still bulldoze your way towards indie cult hero status. Penning unserious songs about motorways (‘M5’) and the everyday myths of 21st-century life (‘Here’s The Thing’), the band were almost an antithesis to the serious post-punk sprouting all over the UK, providing the escapism that young people so desperately craved.
While naysayers couldn’t see past six middle-class individuals writing under the guise of self-deprecation, the London-based six-piece earned a Mercury Prize nomination for their 2020 debut ‘Deep Down Happy’ just five years after forming in Cambridge.
When UK festivals returned after the pandemic, it felt like Sports Team had forced their way onto every line-up. Completely sold by the band’s affability, their dedicated young fanbase were treated to second LP ‘Gulp!’ in 2022, which picked up the indie-punk baton directly from the debut. Three years later, some unusually sizeable downtime and a stint in the Norwegian coastal city of Bergen have paved the way for its successor.
‘Boys These Days’ arrives after one of the band’s most transformational periods to date. They’ve changed record labels and grappled with approaching the end of their twenties, and – perhaps reflective of those evolutions – their third album also suitably shifts their sound. They could have pinched ‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’ from the ’60s, using the saxophone to ponder how old desires to be “the king of the road” shift with age. Harmonica and cello find their way into ‘Sensible’, giving an exotic justification to the track’s cheeky digs at how the world’s gone dull: “Take me to Dalston / We’ll play Fred Again.. and dance.”
Absurdity has always been Sports Team’s killer weapon. While it returns in its natural form via the escapist, country-tinged ‘Head To Space’, it metamorphoses into a powerful socio-political tool at times on ‘Boys These Days’ – something the band haven’t fully explored before.
‘These Days’ pokes fun at toxic masculine tropes (“Good God, boys these days / Look like girls”) by turning it into the indie-rock community’s new chant. ‘Bang Bang Bang’ combats the scarily casual attitudes to gun culture in the USA by taking the mickey (“He don’t get hard unless he takes a gun to bed”). When the band were robbed at gunpoint in San Francisco last December – after the song was written, incredibly – the shrug of shoulders from those around them only proved their point.
On ‘Boys These Days’, Sports Team flip the narrative of an increasingly stark, divided world to embrace the childlike side of human nature, staying true to that foundational principle of the band. Sonically, it’s a step up from the guitar-driven mayhem that characterised their roots, without just slapping some synths on top like many of their indie counterparts. In reality, they’ve never sounded closer to that wacky, eccentric live band down your local on a Friday night – and maybe that’s where their truest form lies.
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The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
