"It’s quite funny talking about this,” Getdown Services' Josh Law jokes. “Like, if you overheard this conversation, you’d think we’d made fucking Kid A."
Sitting beside bandmate Ben Sadler on one side of a video chat, Law is explaining the comedic grey area inhabited by their forthcoming album Massive Champion, announced today with the release of new single "I Can't Die Like That." He cites the opening track “Poor Bannister,” a jaunty, banjo-led folk song about a man violently puking on the bus, as a prime example: “You don’t really know if it’s actually funny, maybe it’s a bit heartbreaking."
Beneath their goofy Chuck Taylor garage rock absurdity, the Bristol duo is aiming to capture something endearingly sincere: the embarrassing persistence of childish feelings into adulthood, the way humiliation, fantasy, self-pity, and hope never really disappear so much as mutate into freakier adult forms.
Do you ever have those moments where a daydream spirals into a confrontation with your arch-nemesis? As a kid this emotion might channel itself towards the PlayStation console seemingly determined to stop you from beating your current level of Shrek 2 or the high school physics teacher who insinuated you would amount to nothing. As an adult, it might be the Hinge algorithm that implies you're unlovable or the manager who says you’re doing a great job but lack of promotion might insinuate you amount to nothing. So much of life’s frustration is inanely out of our control, but that doesn’t stop us from spending a few stolen minutes on the morning commute or in the shower imagining ourselves as the ultimate victor. Or, in Getdown Services terms, the Massive Champion.
“Everyone thinks they’re the underdog. Everyone thinks they’ve got it worse or harder, or that the emotions they feel are real and the emotions everyone else feels are blown out of proportion,” Sadler says. “I think that’s quite a childish thing — that thing of being in the shower like, ‘Yeah, well what about this? I’ll show them.’ Then I’d walk away in slow motion while everyone’s going, ‘That guy rocks,’ crowd-surfing me out, and for some reason I’m really hench with a six-pack,” he continues, laughing alongside Law.
“It's about recognizing the parts of us that are like that and trying to pick at it — that's the character,” Law adds. “In the past, anything that's been self-loathing has been self-punishing in an egotistical way where you're still making yourself the main character. This is more trying to observe it rather than just go, ‘I'm a piece of shit.’”
That blend of self-awareness, delusion, and vulnerability powers Massive Champion, a concise record where silliness constantly curdles into melancholy. There are comedic bits and a whimsical ballad that feels like a distant cousin of Frank Sinatra’s “Somethin’ Stupid.” Getdown Services songs often arrive like punchlines before quietly revealing themselves as tiny existential crises: jokes masking adult anxieties, funny stories unfolding into abject tragedies, tantrums disguised as Nile Rodgers-adjacent bangers.
For years, the duo’s music has thrived in the space where life becomes so maddening and uncomfortable that laughter feels like the only reasonable response. They’ve written songs about junk food, celebrity chefs, and bodily fluids; their 2025 EP Crumbs 2 features a track called “Vomit, Piss And Shit,” while the album’s lead single “Radiator” contains the incredible line “I eat raw flour and call the shit a cake.” But beneath the chaos has always been a fixation on mortality, boredom, class anxiety, and the exhausting absurdity of modern life. Getdown Services understand that sometimes the difference between a nervous breakdown and a joke is just timing.
Law and Sadler have been best friends since middle school, when the two met in math class shortly after Sadler moved from Manchester to West Somerset. "Josh was this lad with enormous hair and a massive group of mates that all called him Yeti," Sadler recalls. Law remembers the connection just as vividly, mostly because Sadler actually made him laugh the way his dad or older brother did. "My mates at school were all kind of sporty types," he says. "They were nice, but they weren’t very funny. Ben was actually funny, in the same way my family were funny. That was my first impression — also that he was really red," he adds, laughing.
“I knew that was coming!” Sadler shoots back. “I didn’t have a skin condition. I just had a lot of blood.”
Around the age of 14, the pair started making music together, forming a covers band where Law played bass and Sadler played drums while performing songs by Kasabian and Paolo Nutini. Asked what bands their younger selves imagined ending up in, Sadler answers Arctic Monkeys while Law picks the White Stripes.
Years later, that closeness has started to reshape how they make music together. While Law still handles most of the production, the writing on Massive Champion became far more collaborative, with the duo increasingly writing lyrics for each other and imposing limitations on themselves to make songs shorter, sharper, and more cohesive than their debut album, which they describe as more of a “best-of” collection spanning several years.
Even though nostalgia hangs over much of Massive Champion, Law and Sadler say they only recognized that thread midway through making the album. On nostalgic standout “Cha Cha Slide,” Sadler slips into the perspective of an impulsive and adamant six-year-old, singing about blue drinks, Dennis the Menace, and holding his teacher’s hand over drooping guitar plucks and a jaunty beat. It turns childhood innocence into something both funny and vaguely devastating. “It’s interesting, this idea that you get loaded with these internal problems when you’re a kid,” Law reflects. “You think they go away, but you just think about them in a more adult way. They’re still the same feelings. You know when a toddler has a meltdown? You still feel like that as an adult. You just learn not to cry, basically.”
That realization also reframed how Getdown Services thought about their earlier music. Sadler describes much of the duo’s older work as more outwardly bitter — songs fueled by “fuck you” energy aimed at everyone else. In the past, Getdown Services treated anything too poetic or metaphorical as “cringe,” preferring lyrics that sounded blunt, conversational, and casually tossed-off. Over time, that approach began to feel like its own form of hiding. “You think you’re being vulnerable because you’re saying things exactly how you’d say them to your mate,” Law explains. “But after a while you realize you’re maybe hiding behind that a bit.”
But making Massive Champion coincided with a period where the band’s lives had stabilized in certain ways, forcing them to confront those feelings differently. “Now that we’re doing this full-time, it’s really hard to be hateful to the world, but we still have these familiar feelings. You know when people are really dissatisfied and miserable, they always go, ‘Oh, it was so much better when I was a kid,’ I think maybe subconsciously, that might be what we're trying to reach for a little bit. That might explain why there’s a lot of childhood stuff,” Sadler says.
On Massive Champion, the duo allow themselves to stretch outward lyrically, dressing songs up instead of stripping them down. The album jumps between genres and moods — wiry post-punk, pub-rock chaos, tender acoustic moments — while still feeling unified by the same unstable emotional world. “The challenge was, how can we jump between genres but it still feels like the same world?” Law says. It’s a playful tug-of-war between irony and sincerity, stupidity and wisdom, joy and humiliation that gives Massive Champion its strange sentimental gravity. Like the Beach Boys, “Puff The Magic Dragon,” or “You Are My Sunshine,” Getdown Services understand that the saddest feelings often arrive disguised as the most earnest songs.
“There’s a big thing in the UK, and with us as people, where you just tend to laugh things off a little bit,” Sadler says. “Like, ‘Oh, it’s shit, we're all unhappy, let’s just fucking go mental and talk about poo.’ But it’s actually worked for us. It’s helped us feel loads better.”
For Law, Massive Champion ultimately circles back to the strange mythology people build around adulthood itself, the idea that when you grow up, you become super mature and know everything, leaving your childhood perspective behind. But there is no point where you reach that. We’re all just giant babies all the time. On Massive Champion, Getdown Services turn that realization into something strangely comforting. Maybe you don’t need to become the hero of the story to survive it.
TRACKLIST:
01 "Poor Bannister"
02 "I Can’t Die Like That"
03 "Probiotic"
04 "Cha Cha Slide"
05 "The Radiator"
06 "The Definitive Map"
07 "A Crazy Story"
08 "What’s On Your Mind?"
09 "Stop Living"
10 "No One Likes Me"
11 "Check The Definition"
12 "Lentils"
13 "600 Dance Lessons"
Massive Champion is out 8/14 via Breakfast Records. Pre-order it here.
