“Your Limitations Inform Your Art, But They Can't Stop You From Making It”: Yard Act Talk Life’s Complexities And Their Terrific Third Album.

On their third album, You’re Gonna Need a Little Music, Leeds-based four-piece Yard Act swims in biting satire and electric arrangements. Vocalist and frontman James Smith is just as resolute and vital in conversation.

Yard Act remains as daring and distinct as ever. The Leeds quartet’s rousing 2022 debut album, The Overload, came as the post-punk renaissance of the late 2010s was losing agency, increasingly tepid and pastiche. But vocalist James Smith, bassist Ryan Needham, guitarist Sam Shipstone and drummer Jay Russell breathed fresh life into the movement, with their hair-raising live performance, proggy arrangements, and Smith’s concrete-tinged poetry. 

The record soared to critical adoration, scoring a Mercury Prize nomination and earning a No.2 position in the UK album charts. The band followed up its success two years later with the equally impactful, potently personal Where’s My Utopia, and within five years of officially forming as a group, Yard Act were among the most acclaimed and significant bands in Britain. 

For their third album, You’re Gonna Need A Little Music, released on 17th July via Island Records, Yard Act reached for artistic idiosyncrasies through a more conventional, classic creative process. While their debut was made virtually during the pandemic and the sophomore was concocted on laptops while the band toured profusely, this new work finds the quartet recording live as a band for the first time. The shift in approach pays dividends; the project is scintillating and raw, packed with grisled and gargantuan recordings that are loose and free-wheeling. 

Atop the pithy musical backdrops, Smith rasps, roams and ravages. Perfectly imperfect, his vocals sound like they come from somewhere deep within himself, controlled only when he allows them to be, his Northern twang adding further character to the expressive and eclectic performances. Lyrically, he is in the form of his life, vividly depicting modern life in its pain, angst and beauty, adding colour to mundanity with broad and delicate brushstrokes alike. 

Speaking with Man About Town, the vocalist and frontman delves deep into his view of contemporary society, pushing Yard Act’s sonic identity, and why the North of England continues to make the best music.

Congratulations on your new album! How are you feeling now that it’s out in the world?

Relieved. It always feels like closure to share the thing that has consumed you for so long.

How has the world now, compared to when you were writing your sophomore record, altered the way you conceived and created this LP?

I think as a whole "the world" is very much on the same trajectory as it has been since we started this band, and ultimately since Thatcher and Reagan ushered in the age of Neo-Liberalism. Where we are now is a culmination of the ideology America and the UK committed to then and pretty much the rest of the world followed not long after. It hasn't come out of nowhere. I think we were pretty much all either fooled by, or submitted to the illusion that this way of living would bring us happiness and be sustainable. But by now, whether we are willing to admit it or not, we all know what the issues that humanity faces are and as an interconnected global society we cannot escape the constant reminder of that on a daily basis. We sort of did sleepwalk into this as a society though, and now the alarm bells are really ringing there's an immense sense of intense panic to change course immediately. We as a species are governed, more than we'd like to admit, by our emotions. Particularly negative ones. Fear spreads faster than hope. Hate is easier to submit to than love, and populist leaders prey on that. We should oppose their rhetoric at every turn and do everything we can to warn those who are lost and scared not to fall for their simple solutions to complex problems. That message remains the same as it has ever since I began engaging in politics and began to punch my way out of the cocoon of a sheltered youth.

But as an artist, I find it troubling how much modern music (which is more often than not made by people who lean toward left wing ideologies) now relies on this over simplification of the world. The sloganeering, the easy targets, the obvious message. It is not enough, in this day and age, for me, when we are so overwhelmed by such a constant tidal wave of information, and so much of it completely false or skewered toward a bias which might not be incorrect but that neglects other important information worth considering for fear it will invite critical thinking and deviate from the sole point it is trying to prove...

To distill your message to something so utterly simple within any artform... so that it will immediately evoke a cheer from a big crowd of people when you shout it from the stage, or can be consumed and reshared without discussion on social media because it bolsters the image of the self we want to be seen as by strangers.

I don’t know exactly how to articulate this without coming across as overly cynical, but I find that quite unnerving and a little icky. Building a successful brand is ultimately about knowing what you're selling, even the image of yourself as a socialist, a communist even.. I do think art that understands itself like that, ultimately can never change anything and can never be truly great. I appreciate that sounds quite egotistical, and I don't feel like I'm achieving anything close to this most every time I run my mouth off over a couple chords that fit together real nice, but I think as a writer I can't submit to that overly simplistic view of the world. Good vs Evil. Us vs them. It's a fantasy and a marketing strategy. The wheel can't be reinvented every time an artist bashes out a tune and speaks about what they see and we're all standing on the shoulders of giants because radical reinvention doesn't and never has existed in a vacuum, but I do hope this record at least resists, and at best regains some ground for art as a medium which can't be condensed and explained via a cut and paste message about how the world should work, because that's not the art's job. Ultimately my resistance to seeing the world as black and white has been bolstered by witnessing how so many others do. Which is a hard sell... but I guess that's what's changed. I've become more confused than I was before, and I'm pretty certain that's the right approach..

How did the previous two records inform the making of this third album? What did you take from them? What did you approach differently?

I think every record we have made so far reflects the time and space we were in when we made it. It's not a conscious thing. Your limitations inform your art, but they can't stop you from making it. The first album was made on laptops remotely because of the pandemic. The second album was made on laptops together because we were on the road the entire time. This time we built a really good studio in Leeds and got to play as a band together on record for the first time. We had a long uninterrupted period where we were left alone to make it, but we would've done this on the first two albums if we could've.

The album is titled You’re Gonna Need A Little Music. Who, do you think, needs a little music more than anyone else?

Paul Scholes.

The new record feels like an opaque and often cynical look at life’s complexities. Where did the foundations of its thematic ideas come from? Where did they grow to?

Again, it's an act of resistance for me to not fully understand what I'm trying to say, and in this day and age, in the "attention economy" as they call it in the industry. It feels almost like self-sabotage. But I'm being true to myself, I'm not sure of who I am and I'm selling a big fat question mark that only gets bigger and fatter the more you listen to it. Why would you buy a question that can never be answered when you can get an answer that can never be questioned on the Internet for free?

It’s musically the most diverse and daring album you’ve made. Who and what influenced the sonics?

Sonically, not loads were discussed with this one. We rarely talked about music in the studio, which is quite bizarre for us but I think a sign that we are really starting to find our own sound. I think we felt comfortable that what we were influenced by would seep into the music without conscious consideration. That said "small car" by John Lurie was an influence on the title track and "Tom's Diner" by Suzanna Vega was an influence on Janey Said, though these were more thematic jump offs than sonic inspiration.

You worked with acclaimed producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen for this album – why was he the man for the job? What did he bring to its making and completion?

Justin is an incredible man. He was invested in us and our vision from day one. He was a fan of the band before we worked on the record and he really made sure we all understood our roles as individuals within the process whilst still being committed to the ethos that Yard Act works because what we make together is so much greater than the sum of its parts. He really nurtured the four of us and I think this record shows how four people can retain and express their individuality whilst contributing to something much more important as a whole. People might think Yard Act is about me because I'm the mouthpiece, but it really is about the four of us and I think the more records we make the more we can prove that. Justin really understood that

The record gives off the essence of an important work for our current time. Why do you think this is an album that needs to be heard right now? What do you want listeners to take away from it?

I think like I mentioned earlier, there's such a sense of urgency to change things, that the now is simultaneously gaining and losing its importance. Every time we say NOW is important we panic and then the moment passes and I’m trying to process how all the urgency I’ve ever felt and will feel again has already disappeared from my rearview mirror. You can see how the discourse around music has changed because of this. People want to understand what they're getting immediately. They want to know what they're buying. They want to know that what they're investing in isn't a waste of time. That you're going to play "the bangers" at a festival as if you're contractually obliged. I'm not saying we won't, I'm not really an antagonist in that sense. But the expectation of it all, the supply and demand of the industry, customer and service provider. Even end of year lists. This idea that you can rank albums by order of worth because of the year they were released. It doesn't make sense to me. It gives the industry a structure to sustain itself (just!) but it's not a reflection of the art. How many great albums were panned and later re-evaluated, how many were missed all together only to be dug up much later. How many do we still not know about? How many will we never ever hear? I think this album is pure because I know what we put into it and I know I can't articulate with words how much it means to me that I made it with such talented and interesting people, my best friends, whose view of the world is imbued throughout this thing... but how can I sell you the idea that it needs to be heard right now? I don't know. I can only put my faith in the universe that it will be heard by the people that need to hear it when the time comes, now or never.

Bands are rarely better than those from the north of England. Why do you think it’s individuality and ability to cut through the masses that endures?

I think they put some kinda mutant agent in the mushy peas that makes us all super sexy intelligent freaks.

What is something in life that, right now, is giving you hope?

Painting.