Yard Act gear up to explore the “grey areas” on new album
Yard Act will return this July with their third studio album, You’re Gonna Need A Little Music, a down-to-earth confessional project which pointedly explores the “grey areas” of life.
On July 17th, the post-punk band will follow up their last album, 2024’s Where’s My Utopia?, and their 2022 debut, The Overload, with their third LP, recorded between their hometown of Leeds and Los Angeles.
In a new interview with The Guardian, the band revealed some of the key themes of the forthcoming project, in light of their first single, ‘Redeemer’, which includes the lyrics, “I’ve got absolutely nothing new to say”.
When pressed on the idea of creative stagnation, vocalist James Smith mused, “We’re in this age where everything has to be a manifesto and a statement, but it’s mainly just a one-way conversation. Nobody wants to explore the grey areas anymore.”
The band have long been champions of these earnest moral musings for some time. On their previous project, Smith detailed an incident from his childhood in which he bullied another child.
Smith sang on fan-favourite ‘Down By the Stream’, “He spoke a little slow and I was a prick about it … ’Cause, well, I don’t know why, but I did and I’ve gotta live with it,” while embracing the grey area of memory and subjectivity.
Now, Smith has revealed that the crew are all friends again, as a direct result of the song.
“Oh, we’re all friends again,” he shared, before adding, “All the lads from that song have been at the last three or four Manchester shows. I’m in a WhatsApp group with them now. They heard the album and figured out it was about them.”
He added, “What’s funny is that Jono didn’t even particularly remember me being like that. He didn’t remember it being that bad.”
Smith added that, though getting things off his chest in that way was “rewarding”, it was “easier” with 20 years between him and the incident.
The singer shared that this speaks to a larger problem with society, adding, “We live in a society that immediately punishes and doesn’t want to open up a conversation about our flaws. But you can’t frame yourself as a singular entity of good or evil.”
In a glowing four-and-a-half-star review of their last album, 2024’s Where’s My Utopia?, Far Out observed that the project “encourages gripping engagement by pairing dance-infused post-punk arrangements with wordplay that illuminates this fractured age from the perilous perspective of an insecure post-punk poster boy who tries to use his sense of humour to laugh through the panic attacks.”
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