In the age of situationships, breakups aren’t always black and white. If you were never really dating someone, how can you truly break up with them? That’s one of the many romantic conundrums presented in pop-rock band Bus Crush’s debut album, Sports & Leisure. Not only does the robust soundscape of this project hold the easy confidence of a much older band, but the complex lyrics are impossible to shake if you’ve ever been in a similar situation. The fallout will never be cut and dry when a relationship is built on antagonism.
Sports & Leisure opens with a portrayal of this toxic dynamic in the band’s first release, “Even Score.” It seems all the band’s singles are accompanied by a teaser video released on their Instagram, and for this one, the two members, Olivia Sisay and Benjamin Walker, box on a rooftop, jokingly squirting water bottles in each other’s mouths. The song title alludes to a competitive relationship with fights that feel more like a sports match, as the teaser shows. The more serious moments between the two bandmates in this video, where they’re genuinely fighting each other, only exemplify the track’s emotion. It’s an undeniably irritated start to the album, as Sisay sings about a “devastated” ex, who wants “a piece of mind.” As the guitar crescendos, listeners can feel her rage at the subject for their desire to even out the way they ended things. The album’s combative tone is set in this entry’s steady opening riff, imitating her disdain for this desired reopening of a relationship that took too much effort to get out of.
“Good to Me,” the next, appropriately retro-sounding, song, seems to move back in time, reminiscent of 90’s funk, with even the occasional turntable scratch. The track demonstrates other issues in the relationship, such as their constant loop of fighting; “a long list of hurricanes.” Lyric after lyric paints a picture of how mundane the arguments have become, as natural as other daily patterns. “So I clean the bedroom, I turn the heat down, I wear a path into the rug,” Sisay sings defeatedly. A rhythmic pulsing in the back of the instrumentals mirrors the tense feelings haunting their lives.
Most of the album reflects Sisay’s ever-present frustration with the songs’ subject, like in the fervor of “Better.” In it, we see how complicated the feelings here are—wanting to cry over them “but then [they’d] comfort [her].” The track starts slow, retrospective in what could almost be a sweet way. But around halfway through, the guitar kicks up and the vocals become more guttural to match. Sisay misses her ex just as anyone would miss someone they spent so much time with, but she resents these feelings, any love she still has for this person, how much she did for them; how she “could keep [them] cool.”
Just because our brains logically know a relationship should be over doesn’t mean our hearts are always on the same page. The following song “Sour Blue” gets that more than anything else. It feels like a memory, with dreamy guitar and repetitive lyrics a little more than descriptions of individual moments: “your underwear in the dryer, powdered sugar trees, and a long-dead bird.” The relationship is long over by this song, and Sisay recognizes she doesn’t want to mourn it. But a part of her is missing now, and she can’t fully escape that, even though she physically has. In the song’s last moments, a grand symphony surges behind the repeated chorus. The two halves of what used to be a whole may not “want [each other] at all” but their shared history always binds them.
Some of the quieter songs before these two inform the specific, relatable reason why it’s so hard to get over this ex—that’s the unfortunate phenomenon of befriending them post-breakup. Why would you ever want to still be friends with someone who can make you this angry and heartbroken, one might ask? The very Dodie-esque track, “I Can Hear The Birds”, understands. Here, the song’s subject doesn’t reciprocate the desire to be friends. In fact, reliving all of their moments together only holds them both back, forcing Sisay to “not change” and go “absolutely nowhere.” So why stay stuck there? For a deeply unsatisfying and simple reason: “I can hear the birds.”
“Strawberry Stain” captures this same feeling. More specifically, its title. The song details why Sisay should break up with her partner, seeing “the same question[s] in [their] eyes again,” but she still hasn’t yet because of a lingering, not fully identified attachment. The instrumentals are some of the most consistent off the album, forming a constant wall of droning, shoegaze-y sound. They’re accompanied by primarily shouted vocals forcing themselves to the front of your mind; an audible stain. Strawberry stains, too, are some of the hardest to get out of fabric. Once someone has colored your life so persistently red, it’s hard to make it any other color.
This deeply personal album ends on a unique note instrumentally to the rest of the tracks. “Win Today” is accompanied by an electronic backing, all gloomy synth. The lyrics, too, get less grounded in this song, such as an allusion to Cloud 9 “thick and darkened.” We can hear how much their relationship has regressed with this tonal shift, as Sisay is sucked right back into this ex’s orbit, almost like she’s been defeated by this malevolent force in her life. It ends Sports & Leisure in a harrowingly realistic place, as she can’t help but still feel the desire to reach out to her ex. She may have been “crawling for miles,” but all that’s on her mind is “Did you win today?” At the end of it all, Sisay can’t help but wish the best for someone who irreparably changed her, a break that may never fully heal.
