Start Listening To: UNIVERSITY

UNIVERSITY give us some wholly sarcastic answers in our latest Q&A.

With a sold-out London show already under their belt this week and a debut album on the horizon, UNIVERSITY are charging full-tilt into a new chapter. The Crewe-born four-piece Zak Bowker, Ewan Barton, Joel Smith, and their elusive mascot Eddie are set to release McCartney, It’ll Be OK on 20 June via Transgressive. Recorded live with producer Kwes Darko at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13, the album builds on the raw momentum of 2023’s Title Track EP, pushing their sound into weirder, heavier, and more melodic territory.

Their latest single “Curwen” distills UNIVERSITY’s signature chaos: jagged, hook-laced punk spiked with surreal humour and existential dread. It’s part of a wider sonic world that flits between desolation and absurdity, never quite settling, always seconds from falling apart. Ahead of the album release, we caught up with UNIVERSITY to talk about emotional extremes, writing with Eddie, and what McCartney has to do with it all.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?

We are University, we are from around town and we make music about being sound in an unsound environment.

Let’s start with the album title McCartney, It’ll Be OK. Where did you get that title?

We was worried for ‘im.

You recorded the album live at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13 with Kwes Darko. How did that space and that process shape the album’s energy?

They had a reel to reel machine and cookies and coffee!

There’s a real sense of things teetering on the edge of collapse in your sound. What’s the line between chaos and control for you?

Only the foolish and cowardly draw a line.

“Curwen” feels both brutally heavy and weirdly catchy. What’s the story behind that track, and how did it end up sounding the way it does?

Eddie told us to do it like that and so we did it like that.

Your lyrics swing between bleakness and absurdity “Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo” is a great example. Where do those ideas usually start?

Look around, you’ll find it eventually.

Eddie is a big part of your live identity game controller in hand, holding up song titles. How did he come to be, and what’s his role in the band beyond mythology?

We don’t know.

Smith said you wanted to explore more emotional contrast this time around “light-heartedness,” even. Did that feel risky, or freeing?

Neither, it just was.

You’ve described taking the business side more seriously while doubling down on being weird. Has that tension helped you push the band in new directions?

Maybe, possibly I don’t know.

You’ve played everywhere from Green Man to SXSW, and now you’ve got sold-out headline shows on both sides of the summer. How has the live show evolved as the music’s gotten heavier (and stranger)?

We are getting older and it shows but those bloody songs keep getting faster and faster.

The production feels bolder this time, more colour, more weight. Was there a track on the album that felt like a breakthrough moment in the studio?

Massive as it was the first one we did.

What do you love right now?

Frankenstein, Dracula, The Boogeyman, skeletons, evil clowns, ghosts, ghouls, things that go bump in the night.

What do you hate right now?

Kittens, puppies, Father Christmas, birthdays, flowers, joy.

Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?

Reign In Blood - Slayer, self explanatory.

After McCartney, It’ll Be OK, what’s next? Are you plotting something even weirder, or do you want to burn it all down and start again?

The signs are there, it’s now up to you how you interpret them. “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”