Sensible Soccers are a Portuguese electronic band who formed in the Porto region of Northern Portugal in 2010. The band are named after Sensible Soccer, a football video game that was popular in the early 1990s. As of , the band is composed of four members, and have released five full-length albums.
The band's first EP was released in 2011. Since then, they have played concerts in bars (such as Bar Labranza in Meiro, Galicia), and cultural associations to international events such as the Primavera Club, Paredes de Coura Festival and the first Portuguese edition of Boiler Room. According to Revista RUA, the band managed to assert themselves on the national music scene "through the internet", as a "rare success story that is not based on great promotion or dissemination strategies", and are a "living illustration of how in a rich and bustling musical circuit, but with market dimensions proportional to the size of the country, a cult status (can be) achieved."
The band compose and rehearse their music in the rural village of Fornelo, situated in the municipality of Vila do Conde, north of Porto city. They have often been referred to as a 'cult band'.
History Background Original bandmembers Hugo Alfredo Gomes and Manuel Justo (Né) are from the municipality of Vila do Conde, whereas the other two original members (since departed), Emanuel Botelho and Filipe Azevedo, are from the neighbouring city of São João da Madeira. Gomes and Justo were teenage friends in their locality, as were Botelho and Azevedo in theirs. Gomes met Botelho in the city of Coimbra, and began playing music together at the "public service entity" of Rádio Universidade de Coimbra (RUC). As explained in an interview with the Portuguese newspaper Público, eventually, the two pairs of friends joined together, becoming Sensible Soccers: "We've existed as a band more or less seriously since 2010 — but the idea came from 2008 and the name was already chosen. Hugo had started playing with the computer, made some demos and asked me to add basses and guitars. As Filipe had a studio in the Centro Comercial Stop (Stop Shopping Centre) [in Porto], we started rehearsing there and ended up in a quartet."
The band were formed in 2010, and initially rehearsed in the Mercado na Invicta shopping centre in Porto. The four had "known each other for a few years" before starting Sensible Soccers, and had been linked to other musical projects together in the past. Beginning initially as a trio, the group played their first concert at the Armazém do Chá live-music venue in Porto on 24 April 2011. They subsequently became a quartet - in which format they went on to create their first two EPs and first full-length album, before reverting to a trio once more.
Sensible Soccers EP In October 2011, the band released their self-titled EP on cassette, owing to the medium's nostalgia factor, but also considering how cheaply it was to produce. That same year, songs from the first EP were performed by the band at the Passos Manuel bar, Porto. According to music magazine Revista RUA, "The sound they presented from the beginning was different; a real stone in the pond in what was the music scene in Portugal at the time."
Writing about the band's transition from rehearsing in the Mercado na Invicta to the village of Fornelo in 2016, the Portuguese online magazine Rimas e Batidas wrote: Leaving the Invicta rehearsal rooms took them to the Fornelo retreat and brought them physical involvement with the compositions. "Before, we used to make songs of a minute and a half: 'It's good like this, let's smoke!'", laughs Hugo. In the parish of Vila do Conde, where Hugo Gomes lives, "in a big house", the clock seems to have other speeds. "We can stay there sleeping and everything. That time to do things, plus the time that is less accelerated than city time, certainly marks us", considers Manuel.
Speaking to the Portuguese magazine Máxima in 2019, Hugo Gomes recounted how at the start of the band "we started to give concerts all over the country and enter the festival circuit and the normal lineups of Portuguese bands". The band expressed their desire to one day fill the Estádio dos Arcos, a stadium in their home village of Vila do Conde which can accommodate 12,815 people.
2013 developments 2013 marked an important year for the band, as they performed in February at the inaugural Portuguese Boiler Room event, attaining some international exposure. According to bandmember Hugo Alfredo Gomes, their appearance "opened a lot of doors for us and generated some buzz around the band, especially in the following weeks", and as a result of it they were also hired to perform at a wedding in Madeira. Also in 2013, the band's 10-minute single "Sofrendo Por Você" (Suffering For You) took the form of an "instant pop classic" in Portugal that summer, according to Galeria Zé dos Bois. A music video was produced for the track, consisting of a fixed shot in front of an abandoned factory near Fornelo, in which "a bunch of strange men begin, one by one, dancing in the weirdest way imaginable." The men dancing were friends of the band. Following the single's success, enthusiasm surrounding the band further increased and the band signed to Czech publisher AMDISCS.
In late 2013, promoting their upcoming debut album "8", the band expressed in an interview their intention to "grow in a sustained way on the national scene, and to pave the way outside Portugal. The desire for internationalization is something in which we have tried to invest, and we believe that with this new album some doors can be opened in that sense."
Twin Turbo In January 2014, the track "Twin Turbo" was used in a video on Cristiano Ronaldo's official Facebook account, celebrating his recent winning of the 2013 FIFA Ballon d'Or. The video was watched more than 5.5 million times in 40 hours. The band had previously expressed in an interview that they were "fervent admirers of President Ronaldo."
8 The album "8" was released in February 2014 and was well-received, attaining some 'Record of the Year' awards in their home country. Some fans were left "astonished" however as to why the single "Sofrendo Por Você", then the band's biggest hit, was not included on the album, but as the band explained to Público: "Some people think we didn't put the song on the record out of a tantrum in reaction to the recognition it had, and I know it's strange that it was left out, but it was never planned to be on the album. In fact, the mere fact that it exists is almost a miracle: we started it two and a half years ago, we gave it many turns and when we finally found a record that we liked we put it out. But at that time the album was already recorded", they justify.
As with their first EP, the band chose to edit and release the album "8" on cassette, "revitalizing a format that was on the verge of death" according to bandmember Emanuel Botelho. Botelho noted that they, as well as "many more people in the last 3-4 years", had opted for a cassette release owing partly to its cheapness of production: "The cassette edition has that nostalgic charge you talk about, but it also has a very important practical side: it's extremely cheap to produce. This also allows it to be accessible to the public, and the question of many people already not being able to play cassettes is a bit fallacious: in fact, those who buy physical formats, whatever those formats are, will still listen to the digital version in the overwhelming majority of times, for convenience. The purchase of physical formats is increasingly associated with the logic of collecting..."
The number '8' was chosen as the album title due to the band "lik(ing) the idea of the name of the record being a number/symbol", and also due to the fact that the album contains eight tracks. When asked about the meaning behind some of the song titles, Botelho responded: "Throughout the album the idea of tribute is present. Nikopol is a comic book character, Dibo is an Ivorian star from Rio Ave (football club) and Ulrike is a left-wing political activist behind a revolutionary movement in Germany in the late 60s, early 70s. The other songs are also people or characters. And a cat." Bandmember Hugo Alfredo Gomes noted that "the album is to be listened to at home, with headphones or stretched out on a sofa looking at some speakers. This is how we imagine the listening of 8."
Speaking to a journalist in July 2014, the band mused on their music making process at the time: "We arrived in search of a way to present our songs live. We have a lot of material limitations and not only that, so the initial phase was noisier, dirtier. For "8" we had friends who lent us material seriously and the result was different. We have been evolving and Filipe together with João Moreira has been producing and polishing our live sound until this moment. Aesthetically, we walk through areas that please the four (of us). Although we like different things, we touch each other in points. We all have a taste for repetition, for example. The themes end up showing that our influences are very varied and poorly defined. We are not a genre band."
In summer 2014, prior to the annual FUSING Culture Experience cultural festival in the Portuguese city of Figueira da Foz, the band stated in an interview that they "were thinking of releasing some pigeons before the concert started", adding that it was the first time they had ever performed on a beach. They also appeared at Boom Festival that same year, and played concerts outside of the Iberian Peninsula. Sometime after the release of 8, founding member and bassist Emanuel Botelho left the band (due to "incompatibilities with his personal life"), and was replaced by bassist André Simão, who had already participated in the group's first albums.
In February 2015, Portuguese music magazine Altamont chose 'AFG' as its song of the day.
Villa Soledade In February 2016, the band released their second album Villa Soledade, named after a house situated on the main road between the towns of Fornelo and Trofa which the owner had decorated with monuments, statues and figures as a tribute to his dead son. Commenting on the minimalist design of the album cover, online magazine Arte Factos noted it as "one of the best artworks of recent times, a clear revival of the potential of Office 98", also noting that the music on the album overall was "less dark" than that of its predecessor "8". In October 2016, the band supported English band The Comet Is Coming at a concert in Musicbox, Lisbon.
In 2017, after the tour in support of the album Villa Soledade, founding member and guitarist Filipe Azevedo also departed the band, leaving them as a trio. After the departure of Azevedo, "the bass became the main voice," according to Gomes, "responsible for the melodic lines that were (previously) made by the guitar with another texture."
In July 2017, French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles highlighted the band's performance at that month's Super Bock Super Rock festival in Lisbon as "One of the most fascinating discoveries of the weekend", adding that with "neither a singer nor a leader to captivate the audience: a guitar, a bass and a multitude of synths, the band accompanies the sunset with its layers and takes us into a universe with airy and heady modular melodies."
Describing the evolution of the band's sound as of 2018, the digital magazine Europavox wrote: Each composition penned by Sensible Soccers has its weight, having no problem in going well beyond the four-minute mark and becoming a progressive mellow trip. If the first projects went for the post-rock chillwave trend, then their latest, Villa Soledade, takes that exploration further, incorporating funky basslines, African rhythms or krautrock influences in a seamless manner.
Aurora