Belle and Sebastian wrote a Scottish World Cup anthem called It Only Takes One Lion

Glasgow's most bookish band goes football

Belle and Sebastian have written a Scottish World Cup anthem, and the title alone tells you everything about the band's sensibility. According to Pitchfork, the song is called "It Only Takes One Lion" and was written by Stuart Murdoch and the rest of the group in the wake of Scotland's dramatic qualification last November.

Why this matters

Football anthems are a genre unto themselves, and they are almost always terrible. Belle and Sebastian bringing their quiet, literate Glasgow pop to the format is at minimum an interesting experiment. Whether "It Only Takes One Lion" leans into the euphoria the occasion demands or stays true to the band's more delicate instincts is the real question. If you know the band's catalogue, you can probably make a reasonable guess.

Scotland's qualification was described by Pitchfork as dramatic, which tracks with any football fan's memory of November playoff football. The song exists, then, as a document of a specific emotional moment for a country that has had complicated feelings about major tournaments for a long time. That context does more for the track than any marketing campaign could.