Yard Act - You're Gonna Need A Little Music

Third Time Lucky, The Leeds Quartet Find Their Truest Form

Yard Act have always been a band that inspired strong opinions. Their debut, The Overload, arrived in 2022 like a dispatch from the frontline of post-Brexit Britain, all wiry guitars and sardonic spoken-word vocals, and it earned a Mercury Prize nomination and a chorus of critics declaring them the sharpest post-punk act in the country. Its follow-up, Where's My Utopia?, was a pivot that confused as many people as it delighted, trading the angular urgency for disco flourishes and danceable grooves, a Gorillaz-esque turn that suggested James Smith was more interested in subverting expectations than meeting them. You're Gonna Need A Little Music, their third album in four years, is the record where those two impulses stop fighting each other and start cooperating.

The Leeds quartet built their own studio space before making this record, a deliberate push back against what they called the laptop albums of their first two releases. Months of free-flowing creativity and demoing followed, and then they invited producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen into the fold. Meldal-Johnsen, best known for his work with Beck, Nine Inch Nails, and M83, gives Yard Act a broader palette than they have ever had. Pianos wander through songs that might once have been driven solely by angular guitars. Rhythms flirt with funk and dance-rock. The result is the first Yard Act record that sounds like four musicians playing in a room together, because it is. The instinctive chemistry is audible, and it gives the album a spontaneity that neither of its predecessors quite managed.

The album opens with Empty Pledges, and the first thing you hear is James Smith declaring I've got absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing new to say. It is a typically provocative opening, and it sets the tone for a record that feels like a deliberate retreat from Smith's role as political commentator. Where The Overload chronicled the throes of post-Brexit Britain and Where's My Utopia? turned inward, this album reckons with truth, fiction, and the space between. Smith is still sharp, still sardonic, still capable of turning a phrase that makes you wince and grin at the same time. But he is circling his subjects rather than naming them, and the medium has become the music as much as the words.

That music is the album's great surprise. New Beginnings barrels forward with infectious confidence, anchored by muscular guitar work, driving drums, and a shout-along chorus that feels destined to become a live favourite. Smith's repeated promise to spend your winnings on new beginnings is not his sharpest piece of writing, but it hardly matters when the band's performance is this magnetic. The title track reaches a similar destination through entirely different means. Where New Beginnings surges, You're Gonna Need A Little Music glides. Dreamy piano phrases weave around understated guitars and an unhurried rhythm section, creating the feeling of rolling down an open highway with nowhere particular to be. Its euphoric chorus, reminding listeners that all you gotta do is press play, lands with conviction rather than forced sentimentality. It is one of the record's highlights, a fascinating outlier that takes a brief pause from the melee.

And there is plenty of melee. Thrill of the Chase is arguably the strongest track on the album and the most complete marriage of concept and execution. The relentless rhythm section reflects the endless pursuit of conformity and ambition that Smith criticises, and the track accelerates towards full-blown rap, the most rampant callback to the band's post-punk roots. Redeemer has a real sense of angst to it, angry young man energy to the maximum, with an industrial grind that builds until it culminates in a voice-cracked cry of despair. It is Yard Act at their most fearsome, full-blooded and going for the jugular. Fiction perfectly distils the sound of the record, Smith's distinctive vocals doing battle with Sam Shipstone's crunching riffs, never letting up.

Not everything lands. Fiction leans too heavily on a repetitive hook that never quite develops into anything more revealing. Cherophobe Rock, despite its muscular guitars, feels generic beside the rest of the album's personality, a track that crunches where it could cut. These are not bad songs. They are moments where the album's energy tips into something a bit too blunt, where the band's newfound appetite for volume crowds out the sharpness that makes them special.

But the closing gesture says it all. Over the Barrel dissolves into a katzenjammer of screeching guitars and the discordant clanging of piano, and then the music stops and a tentative plea is left standing. I want you to break through, Smith sings, and it is not a rallying cry. It is barely even a whimper of hope. But it is honest, and after forty minutes of a band grappling with truth, fiction, and the limits of their own voice, it feels like the only thing left to say. The album's subject matter is far more vague than its predecessors, reckoning with abstraction rather than articulating a thesis. Sit down, shut up and listen, Smith spits on one track, but by the record's penultimate moment he is telling off talky talky people because they never listen. Yard Act have never been short of stuff to say, but after all is said and done, perhaps the titular takeaway is to open up our own ears.

You're Gonna Need A Little Music is not as acid-tongued as The Overload, and it is not as playful as Where's My Utopia?. But it does not need to be either. It is a record that finds Yard Act embracing the chaos of their earlier punk influences while retaining the lyrical playfulness that has always separated them from the plethora of recent post-punk acts. The sonic decisions feel do-or-die, and there is a real precision about the genre-bending this time around. It might be more challenging in parts than their previous work, but it is not without plenty of reward. Three albums in, Yard Act have found their truest form, and it turns out to be all of them at once.