Thematically, their chart-crashing debut Deep Down Happy - released in April on Island Records - could only have been made by post-Brexit British millennials, yet they sound like a ‘90s Britpop band, with their rambunctious choruses, zippy upbeat melodies, and constant references to British culture. Sports Team songs are nearly always anthemically upbeat despite the band’s evident despair about their prospects and the state of the world. But each time you try to pin down a quality about them, the opposite starts to feel true as well, leaving you only with words like “eccentric,” and “weird,” which litter write-ups about the band. They make structurally basic rock music with guitar, drums, bass, and keys. Although neither genre-bending or experimental, Sports Team’s sound is difficult to describe. Over the last few years, they’ve become one of the most discussed bands in the UK, despite only a passing resemblance to the country’s trending flavor of rock, a strain of stark, barked post-punk embodied by bands like Shame, IDLES, and Fontaines DC. The six-piece band was formed in 2017 by guitarist Rob Knaggs, frontman Alex Rice, guitarist Henry Young, drummer Al Greenwood, bassist Oli Dewdney, and keyboardist Ben Mack when they were seniors at Cambridge University. This is one of the few statements I feel confident making about their music. Sports Team don’t sound like Imagine Dragons. In the reality where I live, unless they sound like Imagine Dragons or Twenty One Pilots, rock bands don’t chart, let alone keep pace with a giant pop star’s biggest album in years. Albums Chart Title” was an Onion article. I’d started listening to Sports Team a few months before this all went down in June, and thought the headline “ Sports Team, All Time Low and Lady Gaga Lock Horns For U.K. However, something strange happened during the album’s second week on shelves: Gaga was nearly knocked from her perch atop the UK charts by the debut album from a London indie rock band called Sports Team, who trailed her by only 571 copies. Lady Gaga’s sixth album, an homage to club music set in an intergalactic social justice utopia, debuted at #1 in the US and had the biggest opening week of 2020 to date in the United Kingdom.