Yard Act
Where’s My Utopia?
ISLAND
If Leeds isn’t where post-punk was invented, it’s at least one of the most important sites in the genre’s development. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the West Yorkshire city saw the emergence of both groundbreaking and iconoclastic bands such as Gang of Four and Delta 5, who paired the immediacy of punk with intellectual left-wing politics and the dancefloor-friendly physicality of punk and disco. Later on in the ’80s, it likewise served as an epicenter of gothic rock, yielding legendary gloom artisans such as The Sisters of Mercy and The Mission. And in the 21st century, it remains a significant source of genre-bending guitar scrape and rhythmic pulse, courtesy of a new generation of bands that includes art-punks Drahla and noise-slingers Thank.
Yard Act have been the most visible of the 21st century class of Leeds post-punk, their 2022 debut The Overload earning wide acclaim for its high-energy mixture of jerky rhythms, anthemic melodies, and the charmingly sardonic sing-speak of vocalist James Smith. Two years after their auspicious debut, the group present their sophomore album in dramatically different fashion: “It’s now my great pleasure to introduce to you the greatest voice of the entire century,” declares a recording in the opening of Where’s My Utopia?’s leadoff track “An Illusion,” which kicks to life not with pick-scratch guitar or dancepunk rhythms but rather an array of strings, stoned grooves, and gospel vocal harmonies.
It’s only in track two, “We Make Hits,” on which the new record finds Yard Act reverting to their most recognizable form, subtly name-checking both Grammatics and The Fall in a high-energy, jittery rave-up that critiques the music industry in a song infectious enough to make its title self-fulfilling. By and large, however, Yard Act seem more interested in exploring what lies beyond the familiar, backing their noise-pop with distorted beats on the agitated groove of “Down by the Stream,” delving into string-laden soul-disco on “The Undertow” and twinkling synth-adelia on “Grifter’s Grief.”
Where on The Overload Smith zoomed in on individual characters and recurring narrators in order to tell a bigger picture about life’s absurdities, anxieties, and small graces, Where’s My Utopia?, as its title implies, pulls back for a broader view of a future that hasn’t quite delivered on its potential. Amid the disco groove of “Dream Job,” Smith sinisterly sneers, “Welcome to the future, paranoia suits ya,” and on “When the Laughter Stops,” in harmony with Katy J Pearson, he suggests a form of comfort that’s just as unsettling: “Time’s up, don’t be scared / The future’s got a room without the view in your own head.”
Amid the gallows humor, however, there’s more serious reckoning; the drug-addled, youthful mischief of “Down by the Stream” comes to a halt, yielding its pulse to a mostly music-less soliloquy of apology for acts of bullying and an acknowledgement that “the pain never really goes away.” It’s a sobering moment, suggesting that despite the self-defense mechanisms we build to muddle through it, the only way out of the hellscape is through kindness.
