UNIVERSITY, the explosive Crewe-based four-piece formed of Zak Bowker (vocals/guitar), Ewan Barton (bass), drummer Joel Smith and Eddie (mascot), today, 20 June 2025, release their debut album, McCartney, It’ll Be OK, via Transgressive. Listen here.

Recorded with producer Kwes Darko (Sampa The Great, Denzel Curry) at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13 in London, McCartney, It’ll Be OK furthers the extremely exciting beginnings of UNIVERSITY’s 2023 debut EP, Title Track, with the hooks now brighter and more melodic, the breakdowns heavier and the lyrics more refined. The band recorded McCartney, It’ll Be OK totally live, and it retains the delightfully unhinged energy that’s defined their work so far, with everything thrillingly close to falling apart at any minute. 

UNIVERSITY’s humour melds into their music. After signing to a label and taking the ‘business side of their operation’ more seriously, they decided to offset this grown-up attitude by pushing their music to more extreme and more absurdist places. “It’s a side effect of taking the rest of it more seriously,” Bowker says, with the band determined to trust their weirdest, funniest impulses.

While the music can be brutally heavy at times, it’s all cut through with the absurdist humour that is also present at the band’s live shows. On stage, they’re joined by balaclava-clad best friend Eddie, whose entire job is to play video games and hold up signs indicating the (often ridiculous and lengthy) title to the next song his mates will play. Of his role in creating the album, Smith says, with however many pinches of salt you’d like to take: “He laid everything down and told us what to record. He’d whip us if we weren’t doing it quickly enough and was pretty horrible to work with to be honest. He was like Frank Zappa, dragging us by the hair back into the studio when we were out having a fag.”

While Beatles references pepper the band’s conversations around the album as well as its title – a misheard lyric from one of its songs – Lennon and McCartney never made anything nearly as weird or energetic as this. Across the album, UNIVERSITY make catchy punk, gargantuan rock and blackened ten-minute monsters (“History of Iron Maiden pt.1”, a sequel to a track from the EP in nothing but name), BBC Radio 1’s Rock Show premiered “GTA Online”, which cuts up moments of softer musical clarity with sprawling and incendiary punk rock, the absurdist humour and scything punk on “Curwen”, and the sardonic “Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo”, named after the answer to a game of “what would be the worst tattoo in the world?”.

While they might be throwing out gags and urban myths out in all directions, the only thing truly undeniable is the remarkable energy of UNIVERSITY’s music, and the strength of their songwriting. Across its eight tracks, McCartney, It’ll Be OK  travels to a superb amount of sonic landscapes, and is the heaviest album you’ll hear this year that is also this much fun.

Listen to McCartney, It’ll Be OK HERE and watch the videos for previous singles “GTA Online”, “Curwen”, and “Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo”.