It’s oddly amusing to discuss it,
Josh Law of Getdown Services quips. “If you happened to overhear this chat, you’d swear we’d produced something as audacious as Kid A.”
Seated beside bandmate Ben Sadler during a video call, Law is laying out the comic gray area they’re navigating with their forthcoming album Massive Champion, which was unveiled today alongside the release of the new single “I Can’t Die Like That.” He points to the opening track “Poor Bannister,” a lively, banjo-driven folk tune about a man vomiting on a bus, as a prime illustration: “You’re not really sure whether it’s genuinely funny, or perhaps a little heartbreaking.”
Beyond their goofy Chuck Taylor garage-rock absurdity, the Bristol duo aims to capture something endearingly sincere: the stubborn persistence of childish feelings into adulthood, the way embarrassment, fantasy, self-pity, and hope never quite vanish but rather morph into stranger adult forms.
Have you ever had those moments when a daydream spirals into a confrontation with your arch-nemesis? As kids, that energy might direct itself at the PlayStation console that seems determined to stop you from beating your current stage of Shrek 2 or at the high school physics teacher who hinted you’d amount to nothing. As an adult, it might be the Hinge algorithm hinting you’re unlovable or the manager who says you’re doing well but the lack of promotion suggests otherwise. Much of life’s frustration feels utterly out of our control, yet we still steal moments on the morning commute or in the shower to imagine ourselves as the ultimate winner. Or, in Getdown Services’ lingo, the Massive Champion.
“Everyone thinks they’re the underdog. Everyone believes their situation is worse or more difficult, or that the emotions they feel are real while others’ feel exaggerated,” Sadler says. “That’s a fairly childish thing—to be in the shower thinking, ‘Yeah, but what about this? I’ll show them.’ Then I’d glide away in slow motion while the crowd cheers, ‘That guy rocks,’ crowd-surfing me up, and for some reason I’m somehow jacked with a six-pack,” he adds, laughing with Law.
“It’s about spotting the parts of us that resemble that and trying to poke at them—that’s the essence of the character,” Law adds. “In the past, anything remotely self-loathing became self-punishing in an egotistical way where you still cast yourself as the main character. This time, we’re aiming to observe it rather than declare, ‘I’m a piece of shit.’”
That blend of self-awareness, delusion, and vulnerability fuels Massive Champion, a tight record where silliness repeatedly curdles into melancholy. There are moments of humor 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 stark tragedies, tantrums masquerading as Nile Rodgers-inspired bangers.
For years, the duo’s music has thrived in the space where life becomes so maddening and awkward that laughter feels like the only reasonable response. They’ve written about junk food, celebrity chefs, and bodily fluids; their 2025 EP Crumbs 2 includes a track titled “Vomit, Piss And Shit,” while the album’s lead single “Radiator” contains the memorable line “I eat raw flour and call the shit a cake.” Yet beneath the chaos has always lurked 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 simply timing.
Law and Sadler have been best friends since middle school, when they met in math class shortly after Sadler relocated from Manchester to West Somerset. “Josh was this lad with enormous hair and a massive crew of friends all calling him Yeti,” Sadler recalls. Law remembers the connection just as vividly, mainly because Sadler actually made him laugh the way his dad or older brother did. “My schoolmates were all pretty sporty types,” he says. “They were nice, but not particularly funny. Ben was genuinely funny, in the same way my family are funny. That was my first impression—plus the fact that he was really red,” he adds, laughing.
“I knew that was coming!” Sadler darts back. “I didn’t have a skin condition. I just had a lot of blood.”
Around age 14, the pair started making music together, forming a covers band where Law played bass and Sadler drums while they performed songs by Kasabian and Paolo Nutini. Asked which bands their younger selves would have liked to end up in, Sadler answers Arctic Monkeys while Law goes with the White Stripes.
Years later, that closeness has begun reshaping how they write together. While Law still handles most of the production, the writing on Massive Champion became far more collaborative, with the two swapping lyrics and imposing self-restraints to make songs shorter, sharper, and more cohesive than their debut album, which they describe as more of a “best-of” spanning several years.
Even as nostalgia hangs over much of Massive Champion, Law and Sadler say they only recognized that thread midway through making the record. On the nostalgic standout “Cha Cha Slide,” Sadler inhabits the voice of a wilful six-year-old, singing about blue drinks, Dennis the Menace, and guiding his teacher’s hand over drooping guitar plucks and a jaunty rhythm. It turns childhood innocence into something both funny and vaguely devastating. “It’s interesting, this idea that you accumulate internal problems when you’re a kid,” Law reflects. “You think they go away, but you revisit them as an adult. They’re still the same feelings. You know when a toddler has a meltdown? You still feel 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 openly bitter—songs fueled by a “fuck you” energy aimed at everyone else. In the past, Getdown Services treated anything too poetic or metaphorical as “cringe,” preferring lyrics that felt blunt, conversational, and casually tossed-off. Over time, that approach started 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.”
Yet creating Massive Champion happened alongside a period when the band’s lives had settled in certain ways, pushing them to face these 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 truly dissatisfied and miserable, they always say, ‘Oh, it was so much better when I was a kid,’ I think perhaps subconsciously that’s what we’re aiming for, which helps explain the abundance of childhood imagery,” Sadler says.
On Massive Champion, the duo allow themselves to stretch lyrically, dressing songs up rather than tearing them down. The album lounges between genres and moods—tangled post-punk, chaotic pub-rock, tender acoustic moments—yet still feels like it inhabits the same fragile emotional universe. “The challenge was to hop between genres while keeping the same world intact,” Law says. It becomes a playful tug-of-war between irony and sincerity, foolishness and wisdom, delight and humiliation, giving Massive Champion its peculiar sentimental gravity. Like the Beach Boys, “Puff The Magic Dragon,” or “You Are My Sunshine,” Getdown Services understand that the saddest emotions often arrive disguised as the most earnest tunes.
“There’s a big thing in the UK, and with us as people, where you tend to laugh things off a bit,” Sadler says. “Like, ‘Oh, it’s crap, we’re all unhappy, let’s just go wild and talk about poop.’ But it’s actually worked for us. It’s helped us feel a lot better.”
For Law, Massive Champion ultimately circles back to the strange mythology people attach to adulthood—this idea that once you grow up you become supremely mature and all-knowing, leaving behind your childlike viewpoint. But that moment never comes. We’re all just giant babies all the time. On Massive Champion, Getdown Services transform that realization into something oddly 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.
