With an EDM drop tacked on to every chart hit and small-town venues shuttered up, until recently, the guitar band seemed primed for extinction. However, the rise of acts such as Shame, Idles and Goat Girl has bucked the trend, with Sports Team the latest act to join the indie revival. A six-piece who met while studying at Cambridge, they’ve gained buzz band status in 2018 via wry, ironic lyrics about Ashton Kutcher and the alternating romance and ennui of middle England. And, despite only having one EP to their name, tonight they perform a rite of passage for new London bands: a Scala headline show.

Sign up for the Sleeve Notes email: music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras Read more

Having dubbed this their “Robbie at Knebworth” moment, Let Me Entertain You blasts across the venue to welcome them to the stage. The next 45 minutes are a frantic voyage from the crunchy guitars and deadpan delivery of Camel Crew, to Winter Nets, whose staccato, Pavement-style delivery is more confrontational in a live setting. While the rest of the band are largely static, suited lead singer Alex Rice catapults himself across the stage, dancing as though his limbs are disconnected, occasionally offering the crowd pieces of foliage as they mosh and jostle at his feet.

Latest single Margate taps into a certain kind of millennial yearning. The band describes it as “a song about English summers. Hosepipe bans. Overgrown hedgerows. Frayed tempers …” While well received, this pastoral tale is easily overshadowed by Kutcher, the singalong highlight of the night, which sees Rice scale a speaker stack as security look on, dismayed, and the crowd scream “I just wanted to be your mid-Noughties MTV star”, in chorus with him.

Like Pinkerton-era Weezer, you wonder whether the band might eventually tire of this ubiquitous refrain. But with Sports Team – who can start a pit of elbows with the words “I wanna buy you a flip-screen Motorola” and offer up introspective, Smiths-borrowing cuts (Back to the Point) – this seems unlikely to pose major issues. Their show is an impressive one, a reminder of why indie made it back from the brink, and loaded with both earworms and emotion.