The reason for this self-reflection (and for this cover feature you are currently reading) is Yard Act’s third album, ‘You’re Gonna Need a Little Music’ - their most sprawlingly experimental release yet. From the sermonic vocals on lead single ‘Redeemer’ to the almost drum-and-bass instrumental of ‘Thrill of the Chase’, this is an album that refuses to be bound by pre-existing views of who Yard Act are. It’s an ambitious move that pays off in spades. The band’s current setlist is heavy on new material, all of which is received as well as the fan favourites are - part of ‘Thrill of the Chase’ sees James basically rapping his lyrics to exuberant cheers from the crowd.

“James was slightly unsure about the fast rap,” says Ryan. “We basically did the album in five weeks, and then we toured with The Hives for two months before we finished recording. We started playing that song live, and every time James did the rap, it got this huge cheer! I’m glad, because I love that song, and to get such a big response from people who weren’t even necessarily there to see us, it was great.”

“We’re calling it the fast rap, which is fine,” adds James. “It’s kind of laughable, me doing a rap, because I’m not a rapper and I can’t really rap. There’s a lot there which makes you raise an eyebrow and ask what the fuck we’re doing, but I’m committed to that. We’re at a point where to play it safe and adhere to someone’s pre-existing notion of who we are is just pointless. The idea of art is to do the weird, stupid thing. Those crowds were responding because it was complete nonsense that we came on stage and did a weird, slightly slow drum and bass song with a really fast rap from a man in glasses and a trenchcoat.”

“There’s also an element of us being comfortable that people will still know it’s us,” adds Ryan. “It sounds cliché, but I honestly think you can tell it’s the same four people playing on all of our records; you could pick us out if you dropped a pin on any of our songs.”

If there’s a running theme through all of this, it’s a newfound confidence at the core of what Yard Act do. The band have spoken in the past about feeling like somehow their popularity was a fluke, or that everything would come crashing down at some point. James even references their punishing early tour schedule as “making hay while the sun shines... but then it kept on shining!”

This time around, though, there’s been far more intentionality and a bit more faith that they can opt out of the endless churn if needs be. It’s only been a couple of years since second album ‘Where’s My Utopia?’, but for a band who relentlessly toured their debut and then immediately went into the campaign for the next one, those two years feel like an incomparable luxury. They were also a vital ingredient in the makeup of ‘You’re Gonna Need a Little Music’.

“The space we had to make it shows in the finished project,” says James. “I’m so proud of our second album, but it’s completely manic, which is a fair reflection of our state at the time. It was this creative pile-up where we had loads of energy but no room to breathe. I always think of it like an absolute mess of a hotel buffet: all of it tastes good, and it’s worth eating, but thematically it’s a bit all over the shop. Whereas this time we had the time to step back and consider what worked.”

“We wrote loads of songs,” he continues. “I think we could have ended up with three very different albums, just by switching out some tracks for ones which didn’t make it on. We had one that sounds like this!” he laughs, gesturing towards the heavy metal currently shaking the entire field. “But over time, there was an intuitive sense among all of us of it becoming a cohesive thing, especially when we had the chance to play some of it live and bind it all together that way.”

“Playing it live was absolutely crucial,” agrees Ryan. “We wrote everything sat on a computer like we usually do, and our producer basically said, ‘The songs sound great, but shall we close the laptop and actually play them in a room?’ That was a real turning point for how it all sounded and fit together, because it isn’t something we’ve done before during the recording process.”

“Even before that, though,” adds James. “We built our own studio so we could actually jam together, and a lot of songs came from that, which is new for us. It also removed that time pressure and meant that there’s loads of stuff which is unfinished, or finished and just didn’t quite make it in. We want to do a deluxe version to include those seven or eight tracks which feel like part of the album and paint a better picture of the period. Having those songs is only possible because of the time we allowed ourselves. We were just clocking in and doing a nine-to-five writing and recording. Well, ten to four maybe... four days a week, with a lengthy break for something to eat,” he says with a laugh.

Jokes aside, the ability to spend a bit of time working out some songs doesn’t feel like much of a luxury for a band. The relief with which James and Ryan talk about it just goes to show the absolutely ludicrous work ethic the band have displayed up to this point.

With that space comes a chance to reflect on who exactly Yard Act are as a band. Early comparisons to post-punk and The Fall have long since fallen by the wayside, but all of the band have played in projects before Yard Act, and it takes more than a well-hyped debut to shake off the self-awareness and doubt that comes along with having tried and not quite made it in the past.

“I feel like this will be the last album which still has spikes of self-awareness,” says James. “We’re still landscape placing who we are, and we’ve not truly embraced that the whole point of expression is that you’re free to do and say exactly what you want in whichever way you choose to say it.

“Having the confidence to do that has taken a while because it happened for us pretty late. I remember trying to do that in my twenties and getting nowhere, so by the time Yard Act started, I just had no idea what was good and what wasn’t. I don’t know why this band has worked when other things I was equally proud of and tried a lot harder at didn’t get anywhere.

“When the band started, I’d lost all confidence in myself. Yard Act has really been me coming to terms with myself and getting back to feeling free, basically. This album is the turning point, and the next one will probably go even further and be definable only by our own standard. I don’t care about anyone else’s view of us, we’ve got a trusted sounding board in each other and our producer, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, but beyond that it’s just like, ‘You can’t tell me what to do!’”

“I do have an internal struggle in my head,” adds Ryan. “Because there’s a great point with bands I love when they stop caring and actually embrace doing what they want to do. But then there’s another point when they completely stop caring, and their music just becomes terrible. As an artist, I absolutely love doing new things, but as a fan of bands, I do hate it when they do an album that alienates me or that I don’t like. I shouldn’t be scared of that, but a lot of my favourite bands have let me down in the end - it’s tough.”

“I don’t mind when bands swing big and miss,” says James. “You can always respect the intent behind a big swing. What I hate is when they do the shrug, when they half try something new and don’t commit. Even from the off, when we were lumped in with the post-punk thing, we knew we could navigate it while retaining our own sense of identity. It was exciting, but I felt out of step with all of those bands because a lot of them were committed to a sound. I’ve never felt committed to a sound or tried to repeat a formula.

“I guess at the root of it, I’m just not that invested in my own identity and trying to represent it by making noise. Selling my identity is not something that appeals to me. I don’t want to lean into the idea of ‘new eras’ and a big dress up and rebrand, because it leans into the idea of people being one core person, rather than a messy mix of conflicting feelings and emotions - it’s just branding. There are bands that have been much more successful than us because they’ve committed to that and done it very well, but I do think that your art is going to suffer if that’s your focus, and ultimately we are committed to the art.”

Despite this focus on self-awareness and a refusal to engage in easy answers, ‘You’re Gonna Need a Little Music’ veers back far more towards the abstract than the often-autobiographical tone of tracks like ‘Blackpool Illuminations’ on ‘Where’s My Utopia?’. It’s also a departure from the character-driven caricatures of ‘The Overload’, instead occupying a more nuanced space which defies simple interpretation. Sometimes there are flashes of the old Yard Act - ‘Janey Said’ sees James in full storytelling mode - but overall this is a band who are much less interested in easy answers and straightforward narratives than they have been in the past.

“The album is deeply personal but deliberately left very abstract,” explains James. “I don’t feel the need to labour my life or sell it to people at this point. I feel like I’ve mastered that three-part narrative style of writing that you see on our earlier stuff and on ‘Janey Said’, so it’s started to interest me less. As the writing process went on, I found these strange lines which I initially thought could be placeholders were hanging around. I don’t quite understand some of them myself, but they’re more compelling than any literal explanation I could write.”

“By the end of the process,” he continues. “I really started to lean into the idea of multiple meanings and this strange post-truth era we live in. Even the liner notes are deliberately not the same as what I sing on the album, because I felt like the intent and the essence and the emotion could be portrayed in a much more impressionistic way with a bit of uncertainty. I would never compare our music to theirs, but I feel like it’s the same journey that people like Alex Turner and Mike Skinner have been on. You run out of road once you work out how to convey exactly what you’re saying, and you get bored of it. The only lyrics which I find truly interesting are the ones I’m curious about, the riddles I can’t solve.”

This desire to avoid easy answers spreads to the band’s instrumentals, too. The new album is far less easy to categorise than Yard Act’s previous output. The influences that remain are less clear and more jumbled than the easy comparisons to post-punk sprechgesang-merchants which accompanied the band when they first emerged, and the sonic palette has expanded, too.

“I hate that online discourse now is just people wanting clear and easy explanations of things,” says James with a groan. “30-second reviews or pieces which only discuss a band based on who they sound like or what they’re referencing from the past. I wonder if it stems from the fact that no one knows what’s real anymore; everyone’s constantly questioning everything, so to give a literal referential analysis of a piece of art that someone’s plugged their soul into feels like a way of clawing back some solid ground.”

“There are still so many artists desperately trying to ask questions and revel in the nature of art and feeling things,” he continues. “But it’s being sidelined because the bassline might sound a bit like a Joy Division bassline - what’s the point in that? It completely trivialises the people behind it. Consumerism means people demand something new, but that obsession with the new means that they aren’t content in the present and aren’t properly listening or engaging. The feeling that everything’s been done before just makes you restless. I find it interesting because it feels like the emotion and the connection of making things and consuming things is at an incredibly tumultuous point in history. For the first time, technology is smothering music because of the way we consume it, and that’s not me trying to be a Luddite or anything, it’s just the truth.”

“It boils down to this pressure to chase novelty rather than being comfortable in who you actually are,” adds Ryan. “And it doesn’t work, because you can smell it a mile away when a band are clearly chasing something and trying to jump on a trend. We’ve never been guilty of that because we’re not cool enough to know what trend we’re meant to be jumping on - all we do is listen to Neil Young, so the chances of us recognising the next big thing are pretty slim.” ■

Taken from the August 2026 issue of Dork. Yard Act’s album ‘You’re Gonna Need A Little Music’ is out 17th July.