Remember Sports have always sounded like a band in motion—chasing a feeling, chasing each other, sometimes running from themselves. Over the past decade, they've built a cult following on the strength of bruising live shows, emotionally honest lyrics, and an ever-evolving sound that refuses to be pinned down. With their newest album,The Refrigerator, out February 13, 2026 via Get Better Records, the band captures the messy, cathartic energy of transformation: it’s a record born from uncertainty, grief, growth, and ultimately, love—for the music, for each other, and for the many past selves colliding into the present.
Singer and guitaristCarmen Perry began writing the songs in the wake of 2021’sLike a Stone—an album they couldn’t tour due to the pandemic. “It felt like everything I had worked for was falling apart,” she says. “For a while, I wasn’t sure what the world was going to look like post-COVID, let alone my life. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to play music the way I had before.” At 28, she took a full-time job at an elementary school and found unexpected inspiration in the surreal, sincere world of children. “Kids are weird and wonderful and deeply intuitive,” she says. “Helping them through COVID made me think constantly about my own childhood—memories came flooding back, and so did this intense desire to protect and nurture the little kid I used to be. That completely changed how I approached my writing, and honestly, how I approached my life.”
That spirit—raw, reflective, bratty, sincere—permeatesThe Refrigerator. “It feels like a Saturn return record,” Perry explains. “Messy, hard, crazy-making, but ultimately healing. A convergence of all my past selves into one sad adult who needed direction and reassurance and, most of all, safety.” You can hear that emotional arc in songs like “Roadkill,” the first track written for the album, which poses the big questions (“Who am I? Do I matter?”) that echo throughout the rest of the record. “Cut Fruit” and “Thumb” erupt from a place of unfiltered catharsis, often taking shape through shouted wordless melodies before the lyrics catch up. “Thumb” especially feels like a time capsule from Perry’s younger self—“written from 15-year-old Carmen’s perspective,” she says, “so it’s very bratty and very cathartic.”
Instrumentally,The Refrigerator finds the band at their most collaborative and adventurous yet. It’s the first full-length to featureJulian Fader on drums, whose creative energy has been a driving force in the group since joining the live lineup in 2022.Catherine Dwyer (bass) andJack Washburn (guitar) continue to anchor the band’s sound with rich textures and sharp dynamics, while pushing into unexpected territory—see the bagpipes and strings on “Ghost,” or the way “Nevermind” melts from shimmer into grit. For the first time since their debutSunchokes, Remember Sports produced the album themselves, giving them full control to shape a sound that felt intimately their own.
They tracked the record at Chicago’sElectrical Audio just after the passing ofSteve Albini, adding an unspoken weight to the sessions. "Everyone there seemed really invested in the space personally and creatively, so it felt like an important place to be with a lot of love,” Perry recalls. “We definitely worked a little more reverently because of that, but also with a lot of joy and compassion about trying new things and following stupid ideas."
Though the band has often been labeled “emo” or “pop punk,” those descriptors have never fully captured the emotional and sonic range of their music. “We don’t know what genre we are,” they say. “We just want everything to sound like us.” And what they sound like—especially now—is the result of more than a decade of friendship, experimentation, and mutual care. "I think the bond we have together as musicians and as friends is what makes this project really special," Perry says. We have a lot of love for each other and I hope that comes through on the album."
This is an album that holds space for grief and joy, nostalgia and hope, confrontation and forgiveness. It’s a love letter to kitchen-table conversations, to the feeling of dancing barefoot after crying your eyes out, to the people who hold you down when you’re falling apart. For Remember Sports, it’s a document of sticking with it—through time, distance, transformation—and coming out stronger, stranger, and more fully themselves on the other side.
