Despite having an extremely SEO-unfriendly band name, UK punks University made a splash with their 2023 debut EP Title Track. (That title isn't the easiest thing to Google, either.) Now, University have signed to Transgressive, and they're getting ready to release their full-length debut McCartney, It'll Be OK. The band recorded the album with producer Kwes Darko at Damon Albarn's London studio, and they played everything live in studio. Their new single is a blast.
University's new song is "Curwen," a giddy four-minute rush of jagged guitars and surprising moments of dazed prettiness. There are lots of hooks embedded in the band's headlong attack, but they come across as joyous accidents more than meticulously constructed earworms. The "Curwen" single follows the cleverly titled "Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo," which University released as a one-off last month. On the subject of Curwen, the band says, "Pale sunlight bounds over timid concrete, time jumps like a broken typewriter, the future is past and the past is irrelevant, faces falling in the animal soup of time." Sure! Here's what drummer Joel Smith says about the album:
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 lighthearted 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.
Let us go then through the muttering retreats, the stale bedrooms and anemic streets as instant coffee black as cinder leads you to an overwhelming question.
Below, check out University's Nina Dellow-directed "Curwen" video, as well as their "Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo" clip and their McCartney, It'll Be OK tracklist.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo"
02 "Curwen"
03 "Gorilla Panic"
04 "Hustler’s Metamorphosis"
05 "GTA Online"
06 "Diamond Song"
07 "History Of Iron Maiden Pt. 1"
08 "History Of Iron Maiden Pt. 0.5"
McCartney, It'll Be OK is out 6/20 on Transgressive.
