UNIVERSITY, the Crewe-based four-piece of Zak Bowker (vocals/guitar), Ewan Barton (bass), drummer Joel Smith and Eddie (mascot), announce their debut album, McCartney, It’ll Be OK, out 20 June 2025 via Transgressive. Today they also share new single ‘Curwen’.
Recorded with producer Kwes Darko(Sampa The Great, Denzel Curry) at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13 in London, McCartney, It’ll Be OK follows UNIVERSITY’s 2023 debut EP,Title Track, with the hooks brighter and more melodic, breakdowns heavier and lyrics more refined. The band recorded McCartney, It’ll Be OK totally live, and it retains the unhinged energy that’s defined their work so far, with everything thrillingly close to falling apart at any minute.
Speaking about the album, Smith said: “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 light-hearted 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.“
New single ‘Curwen’ sees UNIVERSITY lend their brutally heavy instrumentation and absurdist humour to a scything yet catchy punk track. The new single follows ‘Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo’ named after the answer to a game of “what would be the worst tattoo in the world?” . Speaking of the new track, the band said: “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.“
On the video, director Nina Dellow shared:
“For me this song feels full of complex energies. I wanted to explore those hard to define tensions in-between, where sound and image meet. Making this piece was instinctive; the movement of an ant, the human body and the rhythms become interchangeable. Shooting on Super 8mm, VHS-C and combining this with 8mm found footage, brings into question notions of time, what is real and how we are connected.”
University Live Dates
April
10 – London, UK. Third Man Records – The Blue Basement – sold out
May
16 – Amsterdam, NL. Paradiso – London Calling
June
14 – Manchester, UK. Outbreak Festival
September
6 – Asten-Heusden, NL. Misty Fields Festival
17 – London, UK. George Tavern
For more information on University please check their instagram and youtube.
