“Norwich! We wanna consume you! Do you wanna consume us?” drawls singer James Smith with a grin on the first night of Yard Act’s latest UK tour. It’s a very Yard Act thing to do, drawing the audience’s attention to the transactional nature of gig-going; of band as product, of paying your money to jump around on a Wednesday night. Smith may also be hinting at the carnivorous aspects of fandom, the parasocial nature of the exchange that has always existed but feels even more acute in the internet age, where bands can doomscroll their haters’ disdain as the tour bus wends its way to the next posting.
Smith is definitely talking about the ineffable energies exchanged between stage and crowd, however: two bodies feeding off each other – a symbiosis that Yard Act do well, and are doing even better now that they’ve become a punk-funk outfit. The Leeds band came up during the pandemic, writing barbed slice-of-life songs about late capitalist exhaustion and the absurdities of trying to get by. They were a composite of many dry, serrated northern bands gone by: the Fall via Pulp, with a lashing of Gang of Four, dusted with their own hyper-specific reference points: misguided landlords, fetishised trenchcoats. Student music, but older and wiser.
Yard Act’s debut, 2022’s The Overload, became a rallying point for guitar-inclined overthinkers, with Smith’s arch takedowns matched sting for sting by Sam Shipstone’s garotte-wire guitar. It reached No 2 in the charts and was nominated for a Mercury.
The band toured relentlessly – because that is how you eat – a process that, as per a million other artists passim, often breaks everyone involved, physically or spiritually. You’re doing your dream job, thumbing your noses at all the naysayers. Where, then, are the sunny uplands where your insecurities, financial and personal, vanish? When, exactly, do you feel you’ve “made it”?
That is one of the themes of Yard Act’s second act. Where’s My Utopia? was released at the start of the month, the album’s title printed in lurid 80s neon pink at the front of the keyboard workstation manned by touring multi-instrumentalist Christopher Duffin. New song An Illusion (“I’m in love with an illusion,” it points out) opens the set; later, there’s Dream Job and We Make Hits, all partly dissecting the often ironic business of being in a band.
Some of these songs are extended mea culpas addressed to Smith’s young son, whose future he is securing by signing to a major label and spending months away from home. Some of them are tortured self-justifications for having fun while doing just that. Others are even more personal, with Smith turning his lens away from the character studies he brought to The Overload and towards his own past. Every so often he throws out words that just hang in the air above the melee of instruments. Vineyard for the North is a track about how the climate emergency means Mediterranean grape varieties may take root in Yorkshire, and what the hell Smith is doing with his life. “And when darkness surrounds you, perhaps that’s cos you’re the black hole?” he wonders aloud.
Overanalysing everything is probably what fans pay Yard Act for, even though, secretly, they are just as dynamic when Smith takes a breather, thanks to co-founder Ryan Needham’s stern bass groove, Shipstone’s abstract sheets of guitar and drummer Jay Russell’s lithe backbeat. Increasingly, too, they override all that snitty, prefrontal cortex work with more sincere emotion, and shakedowns that jack the body. They are embracing pop tropes, travelling with two backing singers, Lauren Fitzpatrick and Daisy Smith.
Full of samples and 90s cut-up brio, Where’s My Utopia? was produced by Remi Kabaka Jr, a linchpin of the Gorillaz setup. Live, Yard Act now tilt towards 00s disco guitar bands such as the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem. There are exuberant sax parts, even on older songs such as The Trapper’s Pelts. When Smith sings, you can hear bittersweet echoes of Damon Albarn. On We Make Hits, Smith lays his head tenderly on Needham’s shoulder. The song is, in part, a love letter to how they conceived this band, with Needham illegally subletting a room in Smith’s house.
So while some fans may rate Yard Act’s hyper-specific content about sweets (Fizzy Fish) and crisps, and value the showbiz light relief when they bring on a wheel of fortune, asking an audience member to spin it in order to determine which song of their first EP they will play, the band’s most secure future could lie in becoming more fully this sincere, sweatier version of themselves.
If there is a criticism to be levelled at this first day of the rest of Yard Act’s next two years, it’s not that they have somehow betrayed their angular post-punk roots by incorporating disco strings, it’s that they could go even harder into these night moves. Vineyard for the North (the end of the main set) and standalone single The Trench Coat Museum (the end of the encore) both climax as extended club remixes of themselves, with Smith playing a handheld sampler and band and crowd fully invested in feeding rhythmically off one another. Withering putdowns and songs about niche snacks mostly equals cult status. Making people feel, making people move: that’s where longevity more likely lies.
