Raleigh’s DIY scene doesn’t look the way it did a decade ago. Venues have closed, bands have scattered, and the momentum COVID broke is still being rebuilt, one packed room at a time. Sportsmanship is one of the acts that stuck around.
The trio describes its sound as noise-rock-post-punk “whatever,” and that shrug you pictured when reading “whatever” is the point. Since forming through a Craigslist post, they have released new music at their own pace and skipped what’s typically considered “the full-length format.” Costumes and the occasional cover are part of the job because nobody in the band is chasing a breakout. They write what they want to hear, release it when it feels right, and let the chips fall where they land.
That stubbornness has outlasted a pandemic that cut short the tour for their third record and a brief hiatus. But now they are back on local stages with a deep backlog of unreleased songs and other new things in the works that they’re still figuring out how to record.
What have you all been listening to lately?
Roland (drums): Lungfish. I’ve always listened to a lot of Lungfish, and I think it’s rubbed off on Trey and Matt, whether they’ll admit it or not.
Matt (bass): Lately I’ve also been all over the place: a Danish three-piece prog band called Town Portal, and some mathier stuff like TTNG and Delta Sleep. It varies day to day.
Trey (vocals/guitar): This year I’ve been on a lot more heavy music; that’s just where my head’s been for almost a full year now. Converge released two records this year, and both are great. I saw a guy walking around in an old Pallbearer shirt, and it reminded me how good that record was, so I’ve been back on it. Someone mentioned Thou to me recently too, so I revisited them, and the new Agriculture record has been on repeat.
When you were first getting into music, who was the first band or musician you really claimed as part of your identity?
Trey: I started playing guitar at 13, and got into all the stuff every kid was into then, like blink-182 and Green Day. But it wasn’t until I was 15 that I found a Radiohead record on my aunt’s shelf while we were helping her move. It was Amnesiac, which is one of the least accessible Radiohead records to start with, but I took it home, put it in my CD player, and just sat there totally unable to process what I was feeling.
That was the moment music stopped being about wanting to hear guitars and started being about something else. Radiohead‘s still one of my top three favorite bands, if nothing else for what that record did for me.
Matt: For me, it was my best friend growing up across the street. He had access to all the music and games I wasn’t allowed to have. I remember hearing Metallica for the first time, probably around age 11, right as I was learning guitar. My parents never would have bought me a Metallica record. It was the first band that really got me going, made me feel like this could be inspiring.
Roland: Simple for me: older relatives handed me Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath CDs, and then I found a classic rock station around Raleigh playing Boston, ELO, all the usual suspects. That’s when it clicked that people actually make rock and roll for a living.
What’s the origin story for the band?
Roland: Craigslist. We joke that we all read each other’s posts and thought, “Okay, this person doesn’t sound like they’re going to kill me.”
Trey: I’d just moved to North Carolina for work. I grew up in South Carolina, played in bands there, and didn’t know anybody up here. I put pretty clearly on my post what kind of music I wanted to make, and even then people would respond who clearly hadn’t read it.
Roland and I found each other first. I remember asking where he wanted to meet before coming to my house, in case I ended up dead in a ditch, and he picked Flying Saucer. Told my wife, “This guy wants to meet at Flying Saucer,” which felt like a bad sign, but it worked out. We connected hard right away.
Matt: I had my own ad up around the same time, and I think Trey responded to it. A couple of weeks after Trey and Roland linked up, I was in the mix too.
Trey: The way we got to know each other was that each of us picked one cover song for the other two to learn. It was a good way to figure out not just what someone was into, but how they’d interpret it, which tells you a lot about how they write. The first one we did together was “High Speed” by Coldplay.
Matt: We crushed it.
Trey: I think we all clicked because none of us had any specific goal beyond making music the three of us actually enjoyed. That’s still the approach. We want to write what sounds and feels cool, and not worry about whether it’s commercially viable or whether anyone else likes it.
I’ve been in bands where it felt forced, where you can’t write something because “that’s not us.” We’ve never had that conversation. None of us have any delusions that we’re going to be the next big Raleigh band. We’re just having fun.
Honestly, the community that comes out of doing it that way might be the most consistently rewarding part. There’s no middle class in music anymore. You’re either broke doing it, or if you somehow break out of that, you’re making real money. There’s no in-between where you’re just comfortably a working musician.
Looking back at those origins, what were some of the major milestones getting to where you are now?
Trey: We’ve never released a full-length record, which I’m a little conflicted about. Part of me wants to, but I’m not totally sure why we would. We just write until we have a batch of songs that feel like they belong together, usually around six, and put them out when it feels right.
Our second EP, Heavy Petting, might be the first real one that stands out. We played a release show at Slim’s, a small room, but we packed it out. We handed out ice cream. The whole set was broken up with thirty-second covers, snippets of “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka, “America the Beautiful”, stuff like that. I dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.
Matt: That was the show where we played the Meat Loaf song, “Anything for Love”, and we threw flowers out in the audience, too.
Trey: That felt like a real checkpoint, right after that our band had genuine momentum. Bad timing on my end though; my wife had our first kid right after, so we had to take about three months off.
Roland: More recently, we played a metal club in Raleigh called Chapel of Bones, all of us in skeleton costumes.
Trey: That was more like a year and a half ago now, Roland, not that recent.
Roland: Still a great show. Packed house.
Trey: Another big one was recording our third record. We rented a cabin near Asheville for four or five days and just committed to writing and recording a six-song EP, no distractions. We brought a friend along who functioned as a sounding board, someone outside the band who could tell us when an idea was good or bad.
It came together with a really unified feel, not a concept album exactly, but something close. We put it out, did a release show, and two months later, the world shut down because of COVID. We never got to tour it.
That’s been the story of the last few years, honestly, recovering from what COVID did to the Raleigh scene. So many bands we were friends with aren’t around anymore, so many venues we loved are gone. It’s coming back, and we’re making new connections, but much of the last stretch has been rebuilding.
Have you all been working on new music?
Trey: A lot, actually. We never really stopped writing. Even during COVID, we stayed disciplined and got together once a month to work on old and new material. Right now, we’ve got a real backlog.
I did an inventory recently and came up with eleven songs that are finished or close to finished and could be recorded with little extra work. There’s also a longer piece, something like thirty to thirty-five minutes, that we’ve been sitting on for three or four years now. We’ve played parts of it live, including a chunk this coming Friday, but recording something that long is a daunting thing to sit down and tackle.
The three-song EP we put out last May came from a similar backlog. We had plenty of songs to choose from, but picked those three because they fit together, and because we wanted to try a new engineer and picked songs we thought would suit how he works.
Any shows or plans coming up?
Roland: We’re playing this Friday at Slim’s with Komodo, old friends of ours and great musicians. Something we’ve enjoyed over the years is how many musical friends we’ve made just by being part of the scene, around the Triangle, Charlotte, South Carolina, Wilmington, sometimes on purpose and sometimes just by happenstance.
Who are some favorite local or North Carolina musicians you’d point people toward?
Roland: Brian John Mitchell, who plays as Low Life Form and runs a label called Silber Records, drone and experimental noise stuff. There’s also a band out of Charlotte whose singer sounds exactly like Trey, took me a second to place it because it’s actually Trey’s other band.
Trey: There was a local punk band called Persimmon that broke up not too long ago. They’ve got a new project going now, heading in a heavier, edgier direction. Really excited about what I’ve heard so far.
Matt: Can’t forget Cloutchaser.
Trey: And Matt’s actually in another band himself, Square One, which just put out an EP.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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