Yard Act

Since their beginning, breaking through as a smart, witty new force within the British guitar music landscape back in the dark days of the pandemic, Yard Act have been wrangling with the knotty complexities of the human condition.

Their Mercury Prize-nominated 2022 debut The Overload span wry, winking tales of capitalism and the strive for success, wrapped in the sort of propulsive, serrated riffs that quickly saw them labelled as post-punk’s new darlings. With its Top Five-placing 2024 follow-up Where’s My Utopia?, the band - vocalist James Smith, bassist Ryan Needham, guitarist Sam Shipstone and drummer Jay Russell - blasted both of those conceits apart, creating a musically-exploratory and diverse record that worked to unpick and examine the very notion of ambition and fulfillment; of ‘what happens next’.

The journey of Smith’s lyrics across each of their albums, Shipstone muses, has always been quite Faustian: “It’s someone who’s seeking a goal, and then makes a pact with the devil to get the goods they want, but when they get them they’re corrupted so they get the rewards but also this bitterness too.” “And how does Faust end?” questions Needham. “Oh, not well…”

If this sounds like a macabre place to root the objectively excellent third album from one of the country’s most celebrated bands of the last decade, then it’s also crucial to understanding Yard Act’s newest - and best - record yet, You’re Gonna Need A Little Music. Simultaneously the most dynamic, collaborative, energised work they’ve laid to tape, but also containing some of the darkest, most cynical and truly questioning moments they’ve concocted too, it picks up their tale and examines the findings more unsparingly than ever. 

It feels appropriate that, in order to interrogate these existential subjects, the writing and recording of You’re Gonna Need A Little Music involved the four musicians coming together and strengthening their own core unit more than ever. Weirdly, for a band so associated with incendiary live shows and constant touring, their third LP marks the first time that the quartet have ever made an album together, as a live band in the same room. “The first two records were both laptop records essentially,” says Smith. The Overload was written alongside Needham before the band had fully formed; its follow-up was carved out in snatches of time on tour buses and hotel rooms, amongst a relentless schedule of “slinging [all our gear] in the rehearsal space, going back home, and then a week later piling it back into a van again.”

If their last record was created like a game of Exquisite Corpse, each member taking the track and adding their part in turn (“I always thought that was a really over the top name for a piece of folded down paper…” Needham notes), then this time they laid down roots and gave themselves time. Russell kitted out their new studio in Leeds with everything they required to track the band live at the same time throughout the writing process, including an old piano passed down from Smith’s late aunt that would become integral to the process. For the first time in a long time, Yard Act were able to settle into an “uninterrupted five month period” of creativity, crafting “40 or 50 songs” and allowing themselves to follow their ideas with no external pressure. “It felt like freedom,” says Smith. “It felt like everything I’d wanted from being in a band - to be able to make
enough money to be left alone. 

The results speak for themselves. Recorded between Leeds and Glendale, Los Angeles with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Nine Inch Nails, Beck, St. Vincent), You’re Gonna Need A Little Music rings with the chemistry and energy of a band absolutely locked in. Each track has its own distinct character, whether in the ominous, guttural ferocity of ‘Redeemer’, the sleazy disco odyssey of its title track, the fizzing indie smarts of ‘Cherophobe Rock’ or the loose, cerebral meditations of ‘Janey Said’. It stems from a time of experimentation and exploration - ask Shipstone about “The Code” and he’ll give you a technical explanation as to why these songs are able to constantly veer into unexpected places whilst never undermining their melodic clout.

The sense is of a band hitting a purple patch, where all the efforts of the last half-decade come together and create magic. “I think most bands’ best stuff comes around the 3rd or 4th album where they really outgrow their influences and become their own thing,” muses Smith as Needham chips in: “I keep saying, it’s like Blur. This is Parklife. The first album they were doing the genre-y thing; the second one was a kick against that but they didn’t really know what they were doing, and then they made Parklife, which was the perfect distillation of it all.”

You’re Gonna Need A Little Music, however, is no whimsical walk through suburban England. From the opening self-analytical sprawl of ‘Empty Pledges’ - a track that begins with juddering deep breaths at the top of a skyscraper and freefalls into a torrent of thoughts about purpose, pride and the feeling of punching your way out of a prison of your own making - Yard Act’s third seeks to work through some of the most complicated facets of life.

In some ways, and on purpose, it is a step away from Smith’s venerated vignettes and character studies; a move towards something more “impressionistic” and up for interpretation. “I felt like I’d taken it to its logical extreme on ‘Blackpool Illuminations’ [on the last record], and I didn’t want to tread old ground,” he says. And yet the feeling still pours through, perhaps more than ever. There is a journey, should you want to trace it, from the fictional Isle of Balamory to the fantasy/ reality of San Francisco Bay. Tread the path with him and you’ll keep running into Janey - a mirror to Smith’s own psyche; a person but, y’know, not exactly. “I think the album is about multiple realities and how individualism has led us, in the modern world, to question if there even is a shared reality anymore because everyone just believes what they want now, this is the price we've paid for pursuing neoliberalism ultimately” Smith suggests.

The questions are deep, but the spirit of You’re Gonna Need A Little Music is boundless - not for nothing does its title point to the power of art and creativity to rescue us from the mire. ‘Thrill of The Chase’, with its snarled, frenetic climax as close to rap as Smith has ever reached, is filled with venom but you can also picture it giddily going off in the mosh pit. ‘Redeemer’ might have thrown the kitchen sink - or at least its cookware - at the situation, with Meldal-Johnsen concocting a brittle, metallic soundscape out of a day of rattling pots and pans, but the result is direct, visceral and exciting.

It’s a balancing act that culminates, as all Yard Act albums do, with a final moment of optimism in ‘Over The Barrel’: a track that travels from rinky dink bar-room piano through a euphoric indie-rock chorus and out, finally, into that sought-after ocean. Perhaps it’s less certain than Smith has been in the past. “‘Over The Barrel’ [as a saying] can have multiple meanings. The choice is yours. But,” says the frontman, “personally, I still have a bit of hope in me for how it all works out.” The destination might still be unknown, but the journey is unequivocally Yard Act’s finest yet. Maybe Faust didn’t have the ending all worked out after all.

You’re Gonna Need A Little Music is released 17th July via Island / EMI Records.