Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
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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Isaiah Rashad does not hide behind metaphors on his latest album, It’s Been Awful. The title alone tells listeners exactly where his head has been. Honesty has always been central to Rashad’s music, from his breakthrough 2016 project The Sun’s Tirade to 2021’s The House Is Burning. Across his career, the Top Dawg Entertainment artist has carved out his own lane with hazy Southern rap, neo soul textures, and deeply personal songwriting that often goes far deeper emotionally than many of his peers.
Rashad’s previous album arrived after a difficult period involving homelessness and rehab, and this new record comes following another painful chapter in his life. Between relapses, fractured family relationships, and the invasion of privacy that followed the leak of a sex tape in 2022, It’s Been Awful feels like the sound of someone confronting everything at once. He wastes no time addressing it on opening track ‘The New Sublime’, where he raps, “Feel afflicted, falling over / Ask me who I’m fucking, I been fucking up.” The song dives into his fears around sobriety, his sister’s incarceration, and the emotional impact these struggles have on the people closest to him.
Themes of addiction and self destruction continue to run through the album. On ‘Same Sh!t’, a track carrying influences from A$AP Rocky and Skepta, Rashad references substance abuse directly with the line, “The pills, the blow, the ‘yac, the top,” while nodding to classic Lil Jon energy. ‘M.O.M’ captures the cycle of temptation and compromise as he tries to resist one vice only to replace it with another. Elsewhere, he speaks openly about the physical damage these habits have caused, admitting, “The doctor say that shit been fucking with my heart / but I can’t barely sleep / chasing money, love and all of the amphetamines.”
The emotional weight deepens on ‘Act Normal’, where Rashad examines generational trauma and learned behaviors passed through family lines, reflecting on “Acquired secrets / Learned to be the best at it.” Then on ‘Do I Look High?’, he strips away any remaining distance between himself and the listener with one of the album’s most vulnerable admissions: “Last time that I told you that I was clean, I was lying / I’m praying that my sister makes it home by Christmas morning.” The album’s brutally detailed storytelling may feel heavy for some listeners, but that raw specificity is exactly what gives the project its emotional power.
Still, It’s Been Awful is not consumed entirely by darkness. Rashad has spoken about music as something healing and transformative, and throughout the album he refuses to let despair completely swallow him. Inspired by artists like Prince and OutKast, the project carries a warm, sun faded atmosphere that softens the pain without hiding it. ‘Supaficial’ glides forward with bright trumpet accents while Rashad casually delivers lines like, “Where you going? You a junkie, you been way outside.” Meanwhile, ‘Happy Hour’ turns emotional exhaustion into something strangely melodic, pairing confessional lyrics with dreamy piano production. At its best, the album feels like Southern rap drifting through late night R&B haze during a summer drive with the windows down.
On ‘Superpwrs’, Rashad sums up the cycle he seems trapped inside, asking, “How I get sober, fucked up, then clean again, I don’t know,” before acknowledging his own disappearing acts from music with, “How you be rapping circles around n****s, but you don’t drop, I don’t know.” His skill has never been the issue. The real obstacle has always been life itself. But with It’s Been Awful, Isaiah Rashad delivers one of his most honest and affecting projects yet, making it impossible to overlook him any longer.
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