Credit: Far Out / Jamie MacMillan

Yard Act return with new single ‘The Trench Coat Museum’

Wed 12 July 2023 18:02, UK

Leeds’ Yard Act have returned with the standalone single ‘The Trench Coat Museum’. The new track is their first new release since 2022’s The Overload.

‘The Trench Coat Museum’ was premiered by the band during their recent UK tour which included a five-night residency at The Brudenell Social Club in Leeds. According to frontman James Smith, the new track, which delivers eight minutes of madness, deals with how their debut album “left us open to scrutiny and disdain just as much as love and appreciation.”

Smith explained: “Criticism is fair game and the internet is lawless so you gotta take it as it comes, but I definitely stopped searching for myself on Twitter the day I read that someone wanted to punch my lights out.”

The frontman elaborated: “‘The Trench Coat Museum’ is about how our perception of everything shifts both collectively and individually over time at speeds we simply can’t measure in the moment. Within whatever space in society we occupy, we often see our own beliefs as being at the absolute pinnacle of what should be the “cultural norm” and whilst the completely human trait of being self-assured can’t be helped, it’s an absolute hindrance on our collective process. We are one etc. (Are we fuck)”.

Yard Act’s chaotically brilliant new single ‘The Trench Coat Museum’ arrives with a video directed by James Slater, who says of his creation: “The video serves as a continuation and expansion of the Yard Act universe we explored on the first album. It’s set some 30 years in the future in this strange, dystopian trench coat museum in which an enigmatic character – the visitor – takes an audio guided tour.”

He added: “The song’s an eight-minute banger so I wanted the exhibits to come to life so that we could transition from an exhibition tour to a warehouse rave. It feels like a mini-film which is no accident, we see this as the first part of a Yard Act movie that coincides with their next album.”

This summer, Yard Act open the Main Stage at Reading & Leeds and are also set to perform at a range of other festivals including Latitude, where they headline the BBC Sounds Stage.

Watch the video for ‘The Trench Coat Museum’ below.