When UNIVERSITY pops up on video to chat, the Crewe, U.K., band look like a visual embodiment of their music: chain-smoking joints, piled on top of each other in a way-too-small room covered in giant emoji posters. “We’re from a shithole and we learned how to play in this tiny house in a really crappy town with no venues or anything like that,” says drummer Joel Smith. “So, I think there are a lot of people who are like, ‘Oh, this is the real deal,’ when they hear our music.”
Said music sounds something like if Death Grips percussion wizard Zach Hill were imprisoned on the internet and decided to get really fucking into late-Nineties basement emo — or as Chino Moreno describes it, “a raw and angular sort of post-punk guitar rock.” UNIVERSITY just dropped their debut record, McCartney, It’ll Be OK, and have quickly made themselves known as a formidable live act.
At one of their shows, you’re likely to notice the band’s secret weapon: fourth member Eddie Leigh playing an Xbox onstage while wearing a mask. “Oh, he writes everything,” Smith says, laughing. “Honestly, he keeps us from having our hands around everyone’s necks.” As ridiculous and meme-y as it is, Leigh’s presence does cut the tension of the group’s otherwise explosively emotional performance, with the other three members playing hard as fuck.
“A lot of people have decided to go like, ‘Oh, it’s social commentary for the fast-paced world we live in,’” Smith says. “But we’re not smart enough to make social commentary. We just want to play [Call of Duty] Black Ops in the hotel room.”
Looking ahead to Dia De Los Deftones, Smith laughs that he “really wants to ask [Deftones] what they think about all the e-girls into their music now.” Mostly, though, UNIVERSITY see the fest as another opportunity for them to leave it all out there, Xbox-playing and all. “Live, it just feels good to go at it dead hard,” bassist Ewan Barton says. “I feel like that’s where the therapeutic nature of music actually begins.”