It surely won’t be long until UNIVERSITY are listed on Crewe’s Wikipedia. The Northwestern hub’s soon-to-be favourite sons are emerging resplendent in chaos with a glorious swagger and tongue-in-cheek barbs. Their next step to local domination? Debut album, ‘McCartney, It’ll Be OK’. Sitting pretty at eight tracks, it’s a tour-de-force of their musical influences and freewheeling spirit colliding to create something quite unlike anything else.

“We might be a bit fidgety,” one of the bustling throng of bodies quips as the foursome settle in over Zoom. “We’re going to have a statue built in the area. It’s going to be great,” drummer Joel Smith announces.

If you’re into erratically fun sounds that gleefully wield their unhinged nature, rooted in punk with twists aplenty, then you’re in luck. There are few – if any – currently doing what UNIVERSITY are doing. “We’re not trying to appeal to everybody; only certain people will like it, so it sticks out,” Joel says.

Speaking from a nondescript room, they’re every bit the scrappy, young band. Cigarettes unfurled, the group’s de facto spokesperson, Joel explains how UNIVERSITY reached this point. “We’re massive schemers, funnily enough with some ambition, but the scheming is definitely a massive part of it.”

The blame for getting this ragtag group together apparently falls to Eddie, the group’s silent partner (though many versions of this story exist). He’s the figure you’ll see on stage in a mask, playing video games, and introducing the next daftly titled track via a text box - e.g. ‘Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo’, ‘History of Iron Maiden Pt. 2’. It was he who put an ad out stating “Band Members Needed”. These three simple words summoned the rest of the gang: Joel, along with Zak Bower (guitars/vocals) and Ewan Barton (bass/synth).

“That was about 3-4 years ago, and then this is where we are now,” Joel shrugs. “I don’t think any of us really remember it very well. It was like a three-year haze. It all happened so fast. It was one long acid trip that just went out of control.”

Unsurprisingly, it was their sense of humour that unified them. “When you find out you have a similar sense of humour to people, you tick off a lot of boxes,” Joel reckons. Beyond this, they bonded over a grander dissatisfaction with the state of music. “I imagine we probably hear some of the bands that you’ve interviewed recently, and we’re the people who proper hate what a lot of music is doing right now. We’re very, very spiteful against the music that’s coming out right now,” he says with the non-chagrin nature of someone plotting something truly evil.

When it came to actually hashing out what UNIVERSITY were to sound like, that was all figured out at Ewan’s house. Practising at his dad’s daily, they would, erm, “medicate”, as they call it, and play music all day. They’d watch live videos of a variety of bands and then try to recreate it, eventually unspooling their creativity. In the absence of a bustling local scene, UNIVERSITY are very much a product of the internet. With unfiltered availability to every sound under the sun, music for them was the magic key to freedom. “When we wrote the first EP, ‘Title Track’, we were just trying to write music to entertain ourselves,” Joel explains. “It came out and did alright; being left to our own devices made us what we were.”

This little fact is the catalyst for everything UNIVERSITY do. They’re an isolated anomaly, far removed from the usual London movers and shakers peddling the latest fads. However, they were a bit nervous about stumbling upon others making the same racket as themselves. “We were terrified we were going to find a band that we were just ripping off that we didn’t know yet,” Joel admits, “because we don’t go to gigs or nothing.”

They do confess to being influenced by experimental and math US rock luminaries such as Nouns and Hella, but for the most part, there’s no through-line. Seeking influence from these acts and taking their baby steps by replicating their sounds, they see this as being key in finding their fingerprint. “When you find out that you can’t play like that anyway, that’s where your sound comes from. You can’t take your sound away from it. It’s like how you draw,” Joel wisely offers. What they end up left with is an ashtray filled with the remnants of many a musical cig inhaled and blown into a new entity.

As for how they come to create these noisy slabs of musical freedom (some tracks clock in at a whopping 9 minutes), it’s as simple as picking up their instruments and letting the music escape. From unruly, boundary-less 40-minute jams, they may only find a 10-second chunk that works. “You have to lasso the good bit,” Joel mentions between puffs. “It’s all trial and error. It gets sweaty – everything’s live. We’re not sat with a computer; we hash it out in the moment. Sometimes it’s probably the worst thing ever heard, but then some days it’s the fucking most freaky, outlandish jam.”

When it came time for their debut album, it was easy to stack these 8 tracks up. Referring to each having “tonnes of colour”, UNIVERSITY were keen to bottle the sound of the four of them jamming together. “It’s like you’re in the room, but you took way too much LSD, man, but it’s great,” says Joel. Recorded at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13, ‘McCartney, It’ll Be OK’ is their defiant step towards proving what they think music can be. Born from their mutual loathing of music’s current state, the album is their cosmic attempt to remind the world what music actually is, man.

“Music and art is in a strange place. We still haven’t come to terms with the streaming age, like TikTok and all these things,” Joel ponders. It’s this that’s given them cause to celebrate being different. Not following any real carved path, Joel’s quick to lob his opinion at the popular fray. “I don’t want to be that guy and be like, they’re all kind of the same, but how many bands have you heard in the last three years that picked up the saxophone and the violin and started writing six-minute jams,” he says.

It puzzles UNIVERSITY because they’re impossibly themselves. Unlike buzz-chasers and time-wasters, what you see is what you get. “No matter which way we slice it, we’re going to be in ourselves with it,” says Joel. “We’re not trying to throw people under the bus, but you look at how Fontaines D.C. dresses, and you know he’s not going home to his mum’s dressed like that. I am going on to my mum’s dressed like this.” He wears his scruffy, baggy brown t-shirt with the conviction only the truly unbothered possess: “I’m not trying to shill a package to somebody; this is what it is.”

When all is said and done, UNIVERSITY are simple creatures. They’re ambitious, but to a cult-like degree, rather than to take over the world (never say never). “What I want to do is have a few great albums, and then disappear before people really know what happens. You know?” Joel offers. “I want to quit before it’s even started, but I feel like you can only do that with great albums. You can’t do that as a live band. Our main goal is to do great records.”

With that, how far UNIVERSITY can go, both in terms of distance and expansion around their unruly sound, Joel contently nods, “I see the sky. I mean, that probably is the limit.” Heels dug in; it’s fitting to allow this righteous lot the last word with where they see themselves in the musical landscape writ large. “On the right side of history!” a voice off-screen swiftly offers, before Joel ends, “Even if we’re sat in the losers club, I like to think the real winners couldn’t even fathom what’s going on.” ■