Well aware that the path of true love never did run smooth, Sports Team have opted to give Harry Styles’ “Late Night Talking” some gloomier shades on this Apple Music Home Session. “The melodies are brilliant and we really wanted to take on a pop song,” says singer Alex Rice. “We wanted to make it darker and a bit more of an anxious love song. There’s something quite pristine and optimistic about the Harry Styles version that we liked playing around with. We changed a few of the chords in the post-chorus too, which makes the vocal feel a bit more direct.” Recording the cover was a challenge that proved to be a valuable experience for the band. Enlisting some help from Dave McCracken, who produced their debut EP Winter Nets in 2018, gave the six-piece the comfort and confidence to experiment. “It pushes you as a band to try and better a song that’s already so stripped back and workshopped,” says Rice. “[Styles’ producer] Kid Harpoon and the gang aren’t letting anything in there that doesn’t need to be. So when you’re trying to play it as a group, you really have to rely on all the innate things that make you a unique group. Having the time to try things and realise what doesn’t work was great—there’s often a lot of pressure when you know you need album singles to come out that day. ” The London-based band also took the opportunity to reshape “The Drop” from their second album Gulp!. “It’s one that feels like us writing songs for the bigger stages we’re playing now, so it feels like a signal to how far we’ve come as a band,” says Rice. “When we wrote it, we’d been reading about tang ping culture in China—which is worth a Google. It’s basically the feeling of a generation realising they’ve got very little interest in working hard, burning through their youth for some promised land of debt and feeling insecure. I think that resonates with people we meet. Anyway, doing it all with a Bryan Ferry-inspired trumpet riff feels cathartic when you hear people singing it back together.”