Sports

Sports have been making music together for most of their lives, which makes it slightly funny that it took them this long to make a self-titled album.

Cale Chronister and Christian Theriot met as kids in Oklahoma and started recording together in their early teens, long before there was really a career to think about or an audience waiting on the other side. Over time, they found themselves making music that people have spent the better part of a decade trying to categorise: dream pop, psych-pop, indie funk, bedroom pop. None of those labels are completely wrong, but none of them really explain why Sports sound like Sports.

There’s always been something a little slippery about them. The music is polished without ever feeling too clean, laid-back without actually being casual, and usually built around enough groove that placing them next to the usual indie-pop suspects never quite makes sense.

Their first real breakthrough came with “You Are The Right One”, the opening track from 2015’s Naked All The Time. It was one of those songs that seemed to find an audience almost independently of the band, moving through playlists, algorithms and word of mouth until Sports suddenly had listeners far beyond Oklahoma. More than a decade later, it’s still the song a lot of people discover them through.

Their latest record, simply titled Sports, feels less like the culmination of everything they’ve done and more like a reset. Cale and Christian built their own studio in Tulsa, took over production themselves and started asking what the band might sound like without another producer in the room or a clock running on the session. After years of becoming increasingly professional musicians, they had somehow recreated the conditions that made them start making music together in the first place: two friends in a room, following ideas because they were interesting.

The record wanders accordingly. Soft rock and funk sit alongside stranger electronic production, Auto-Tune, distorted textures and traces of the hyperpop Christian had been listening to at the time. It still sounds unmistakably like Sports, but the edges feel less sanded down, as though they’ve become more comfortable letting the odd decisions stay in.

It’s probably why their catalogue has aged so well. The songs can drift past as smooth, hazy pop if that’s all you want from them, but spend a little longer with them and you start noticing the things that don’t quite behave as expected: the warped synth tone, the awkward lyrical turn, the production choice that arrives half a second earlier than your brain thinks it should.

After five albums, Sports still don’t sound particularly interested in resolving those contradictions.

If anything, the self-titled record suggests they’re getting more comfortable with them.

Calling an album Sports this far into their career could have felt like a statement of arrival, some definitive declaration of what the band had finally become. Instead, it seems to mean almost the opposite. They chose the name because, after more than a decade, the project suddenly felt new to them again.

During their first Australian run, Cale Chronister and Christian Theriot came through Sydney and joined us on the roof to perform “Drama King” and “Keep Falling in Love”, two songs from the same record that land at very different ends of the Sports universe.

For a band that has spent most of its life avoiding a neat definition, that feels about right.