THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “University are the Crewe four-piece formed of Zak Bowker (vocals/guitar), Ewan Barton (bass), Joel Smith (drums) and Eddie (mascot).
Recorded with producer Kwes Darko (Sampa The Great, Denzel Curry) at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13 in London, their debut album McCartney, It’ll Be OK furthers the extremely exciting beginnings of their 2023 EP Title Track, with the hooks now brighter and more melodic, the breakdowns heavier and the lyrics more refined. The band recorded McCartney, It’ll Be OK totally live, and it retains the delightfully unhinged energy that’s defined their work so far, with everything thrillingly close to falling apart at any minute.
Says Smith: “There was a conscious choice in the writing to make it more emotionally varied. It encapsulates a wider array of emotions. We’ve got a more light-hearted way of looking at our band now. It puts the sounds from the EP into colour. Because we’re influenced by a lot of emo and music that’s extreme, we realised things can only be so miserable unless you have something to contrast it with. You can only feel the dark properly when you also feel the light. You want to feel all the jumps… like The White Album.”
The single Curwen sees University lend their brutally heavy instrumentation and absurdist humour to a scything yet catchy punk track. “Pale sunlight bounds over timid concrete, time jumps like a broken typewriter,” the band say. “The future is past and the past is irrelevant, faces falling in the animal soup of time.” Curwen followed the sardonic Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo, named after the answer to a game of “What would be the worst tattoo in the world?” and cuts up moments of softer musical clarity with sprawling and incendiary punk rock.”
