British indie rock band Sports Team has released their latest single, “Maybe When We’re 30,” featured on their forthcoming album Boys These Days. The single, which touches on a particular brand of British couple core—mainly settling down in suburban neighborhoods and living comfortably—could be mistaken for a satire or a dismissal of this culture. However, as Sports Team explains to American Songwriter, the song is “being very sincere … It’s not playing for laughs.”
“Maybe When We’re 30” is described as being specifically British, but the band admits there’s the possibility of a universal element to it as well. “I think in my head the song is situated in a very particular space,” the band explains. “This English suburban landscape of terraced houses, wheely bins, and petty disputes. The Inbetweeners set basically,” adding, “But maybe there’s something universal to that.”
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The band continues, “Growing up I think suburbia was the set-up for so many jokes. Cyril Connolly wrote about ‘the pram in the hall’ being the end of the artist’s life. And I think there’s always this cultural snobbery around domesticity.” However, Sports Team’s new single is anything but snobbish or dismissive.
“Comedy from the noughteens,” they explain, “the classic punchline figure is this suburban middle-man. Jobs for life and triple-locked pension funds. And now that’s this sort of unobtainable dream … But yeah it’s a song about yearning for that life. Not dismissing it.”
Indie Rock Band Sports Team Talk Sincerity of Their New Single and the Process of Crafting Its Simplicity
Essentially, this particular view of domesticity and settling down is unique to the English, as the band explains it a little more in depth. “I think there’s something very English about seeing the world through the kaleidoscope of small inconveniences,” says Sports Team. “Maybe America doesn’t have that in the same way. People being radicalised by potholes, or mail delivery schedules. That’s maybe the most English flavour in the song. Conflict through a lens of bin-collection days.”
The simplicity and mundanity of the song’s images are part of what creates this cultural worldview. “I think trying to write about love, I find myself slipping pretty quickly into cliche,” says lyricist Rob Knaggs. “So it’s fun doing love songs with a more domestic palette. The council bin-collection dates, and Facebook and bitching about nepo-babies.”
While Knaggs admitted that the song is fairly simple—”There are three of four riffs in it that come in and out, but otherwise it’s a pretty straight loop. It all came together pretty quickly.”—its simplicity is part of what makes it so evocative. Combined with Alex Rice’s deadpan baritone, guitarist Henry Young’s “nice War on Drugs style riff for the ending,” and Young’s partner Paula performing the female vocals, the song becomes a backdrop of yearning and longing for a life that was previously dismissed as a joke.
Featured Image by Bartek Szmigulski