Mickey takers? Cambridge posh kids? 80s revivalists? Great songwriters? It can be hard to put your finger on this band.

This review is a few days late, mostly because I wanted to wait until I had seen them play at Rough Trade East on Tuesday, as I was struggling to get a handle on where this band was coming from. It very much feels like this is Sports Team’s year. Each single has gone down well, they are picking up radio play all over the place. Their videos showcase their sense of fun and are picking up lots of views on YouTube and beyond. The new album is very good, in places brilliant. This album will appeal to older generations who will approve of their musical reference points, as well as younger ones who will recognise the depictions of life in modern Britain and enjoy the straightforward tunes that often get forgotten about in modern pop music.

‘I’m In Love (Subaru)’ is the biggest hit off the album but also the most confusing track on here. It is definitely a piss-take. However, they play it so straight there are plenty who will miss the sense of irony. This is how tracks were built back in the 1980s – saxophone everywhere, backing girl harmonies, a singer who sounds like he is performing from the side of a pool in Spain, gleaming shiny production values. It is probably my least favourite track on the album, not that it is bad – it just messes with my brain too much to be able to enjoy it.

Things get much better from ‘Boys These Days’ which ups the funk with a honky-tonk-esque piano and takes the mickey out of all the silly kind of comments parents make to their teenage offspring:

“Maybe what they need is a war
Ah, these kids, nah, they don’t care about nothing at all
When I was your age, we didn’t even have doors, we just had
Playing in the traffic with rocks
If a car knocked you down, well then, you’d get right back up”

The reference points that make up Sports Team are huge and wide. This album represents a significant shift in their sound. At times on this album, they bring to mind Talking Heads, Prefab Sprout, Deacon Blue, Huey Lewis and the News and a whole host more.

‘Bang Bang Bang’ is one of the best singles released this year. Its borrowed wild west trappings work well, it barrels along at pace and the chorus is high-energy perfection. At their best Sports Team have the potential to be world beaters. One suspects their predilections and obsessions around Middle England may make them a little too opaque for those not familiar with the reference points in other countries.

‘Sensible’ has a fantastic swagger to it. There are people between their forties and sixties who will go absolutely nuts for this track, they haven’t made them like this in over thirty years. ‘Planned Obsolescence’ challenges ‘Boys These Days’ as the best none-single track. It makes great observations about the short life-span of many electrical goods but does it with some of the best use of whistling in a track for many a year. Like a number of other tracks on this album it is just insanely catchy and you will find yourself humming them at different points throughout the day, not something you can say about a lot of recent indie.

The album closes with the delightful ‘Maybe When We’re 30’ which has the most devastatingly wry observations of any track on the album:

“Maybe when we’re thirty, baby, we can get a dog
And once a year, we’ll go out and we’ll watch the War On Drugs“

“Well, maybe we could buy a house and we could have a kid
Spend our days on Facebook, such happy days on Facebook
And share Daily Mail stories about David Beckham’s kids
With pithy little insults, such pissy little insults.”

Upper middle-class Britain takes a hammering across the album.

This isn’t a perfect album, but when it soars the tracks are incredible. It remains to be seen if Sports Team will continue to shape-shift into different forms on future albums or whether this is the sound they have been looking for. If you want some lighthearted fun, or some toe tapping retro 80s guitar sounds, then this is the album you have been waiting for.