8/10

If you told someone that one of 2025’s most thrilling rock debuts would be equal parts existential dread, surrealist humour, and punk-rock chaos, delivered with total sincerity by four lads from Crewe, they might look at you sideways. But 'McCartney, It’ll Be OK', the debut album from UNIVERSITY, is exactly that: a wildly unpredictable, gloriously messy triumph that somehow threads absurdist lyricism through breakneck instrumentation without losing either its heart or its head.

Recorded completely live at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13 with Kwes Darko (Sampa the Great, Denzel Curry) at the helm, the album feels like a grenade going off in a cathedral; sacred and destructive in equal measure. It’s loud, it’s deranged, and it’s undeniably alive. Across eight tracks, the band manage to distill pure musical pandemonium into something strangely coherent, often even beautiful.

The opener 'Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo' crashes in with what sounds like an arcade machine having a nervous breakdown, before Bowker’s voice barrels through the noise with a blend of snarl and fragility. And then it all clicks. Big riffs, bigger feelings, and hooks that somehow emerge from the wreckage like lost treasures. The album’s title may have originated from a misheard lyric, but its tongue-in-cheek optimism feels oddly apt. For all the intensity and noise, there’s a strange comfort in this record’s refusal to sanitise itself.

But for all its sonic violence, 'McCartney, It’ll Be OK' is about duality. As drummer Joel Smith put it, “you can only feel the dark properly when you also feel the light.” That contrast plays out across the album’s emotional arc. Between the eruptions of distortion and laughter, there are real moments of clarity, melodic phrases that hit like open windows in a burning house, fleeting but vital. The result is an album that never settles for being just one thing.

The inclusion of Eddie, their onstage mascot-slash-gremlin who holds up cue cards and allegedly dictated parts of the album like a lo-fi Frank Zappa, adds another layer to the band’s mythos. UNIVERSITY take their music seriously, but not themselves. That balance is key. There’s no ego here, just four friends making the strangest, smartest noise they can, and having a blast doing it.

In a landscape where many debut albums play it safe or sand down their edges for mass appeal, 'McCartney, It’ll Be OK' does the opposite. It’s a raw, unfiltered dispatch from a band willing to be weird, willing to be loud, and willing to be sincere in the face of absurdity.