When Yard Act found themselves locked in a battle for a Number 1 album at the start of 2022, it felt like an impossible dream. This time round, they’re searching for Utopia.

Words: Jake Hawkes.
Photos: Derek Bremner.

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to a new year full of promise and potential. Kicking us into 2024 with a bang is the second album from Leeds' favourite band, Yard Act. Kicking off our chat with slightly less of a bang is the DIY going on in the pub we're speaking in, which is loud enough to cause ripples in our drinks (on the menu: non-alcoholic Guinness for frontman James, alcoholic Guinness for drummer Jay, Fosters for bassist Ryan and an orange juice for guitarist Sam).

Loud noises and eclectic drink choices aside, the band are here to discuss their new album 'Where's My Utopia?', a wide-ranging and Really Rather Good follow-up to 2022's debut 'The Overload'. If album one saw them graduate from backrooms and basements, album two seems set to catapult them to a level that most bands spend their whole careers trying to attain. With this in mind, it's a little bit odd that 'Where's My Utopia?' was very nearly a concept album about… a U2 roadie?

"The first draft of the album was even more in character than the debut," says James with a laugh. "It was all about this roadie abandoning his son to go on tour with U2, but we decided that was too high concept and probably not emotionally charged enough. Also, I got to a point where I realised that I was writing an album about a man joining a band and abandoning his son for a myriad of complex reasons, which basically means it's about me. I got my dream job, and what that actually meant is I had to leave my family to do it, and it wasn't as simple and victorious as I'd imagined in my head for all those years."

By stepping away from Bono-adjacent theatre, 'Where's My Utopia?' has inverted the first album's formula almost completely. Whereas 'The Overload''s eponymous first track sees James putting on the little-Englander costume of a pub landlord imploring the band to "Play the standards and don't get political", 'Where's My Utopia?' instead opens with him quietly asking 'Right, do you wanna know what I think?'

That's not to say it's all sincerity and depth - there are still asides about novelty fridge magnets, stupid fish, and the terrors of being buried alive at the bottom of a lake. But as with 'Tall Poppies' and '100% Endurance' on the debut, this surreal humour is balanced against a genuinely emotional core.

"I've just reached a point where I'm comfortable letting my guard down a bit more," acknowledges James. "I never sat down and decided to move away from writing about characters; there wasn't some grand intention when we started on album two. I think really the costume of other viewpoints stemmed from not being able to be comfortable with talking about myself. Probably my entire adult life has been a journey towards being more emotionally open - which is true for most adult men who are trying to undo a childhood and adolescence of being told to explicitly avoid talking about their feelings. I've still got my guard up; it's still a jokey, standoffish way of discussing my feelings, but I'm slowly getting there."

This push-and-pull is the dominant energy which drives the album. 'The Undertow' sees James questioning the value of guilt "if you do nothing with it", while 'Down By The Stream' morphs smoothly from absurd musings about the origin of childhood friend Johno ("I think his dad came over from somewhere else or something / some time in 85 or 86 / or maybe he was from Milton Keynes") to a stark admission of adolescent cruelty and the long-term impacts of being bullied.

It's deeply personal and packs a punch that shows the huge amount of growth since tracks like 'Fixer Upper', without sacrificing the wry smile and sarcastic humour that make Yard Act such a distinctive band.

"I think it connects because it's human," says Ryan. "It's an honest representation rather than being forced or contrived in some way. People make jokes in all situations, and humour is a constant part of real life - even in quite dark places."

"I don't really think about it that much, to be honest," adds James. "Everyone in the band and everyone I've ever been friends with has a good sense of humour because it's the foundation of all of my relationships. To me, it's a natural part of life that you deal with heavy, real, and raw subject matter and still laugh multiple times at silly or inappropriate or dark things in the same conversation. Even when I'm depressed, I laugh.

"Before Yard Act, I'd never put that humour into my music or my lyrics, and it didn't resonate because of that. It felt unnatural because it was. To me, humour is like a coin toss. Dropping a joke at a serious point is like the coin spinning in the air - will everyone be annoyed, or will it defuse the tension and make everyone feel better?"

Retreating from caricatures and eccentric character portrayals may have resulted in an album with more emotional heft, but as the initial impulse to write a roadie-focussed concept piece shows, that wasn't the impetus behind the switch. The success of the first Yard Act album not only allowed the band to quit their day jobs, it also meant an intense schedule of touring, which entailed long periods away from home. This would be a difficult tradeoff for anyone, but with a young son at home, James found himself reflecting more and more on how being a dad changes your perspective on things.

"I'm less and less certain of myself," he explains. "And that means I have less and less energy to tell other people they're wrong. Honestly, I know it's a cliché, but having a kid changed me - I'm way more empathetic and way more tolerant to the human experience than I was. That certainty that I had is gone, and the self-assuredness that everybody has in their own opinions of right and wrong is quite scary to me now. I'm more comfortable not knowing or even trying to know how everything is supposed to be, but what comes with that is that the only thing I can still talk about with any degree of stability is myself and my own experiences. Ultimately, people use stories as an excuse to talk about themselves anyway, so it just means I'm not dancing around the subject matter any more."

Lyrically, the album may be more personal, but musically, its influences are far more diverse than the debut, a direction hinted at by the sprawling non-album release 'The Trenchcoat Museum', which the band refer to as a 'bridge' between the projects. Writing and recording as a four-piece from the get-go (the debut was sketched out by James and Ryan before Jay and Sam joined the band), as well with as a confidence gained from the reception to the debut, meant a freedom to experiment which has paid off in spades.

"We got into quite a good rhythm, the four of us," says Jay. "We all complement each other well in our pros and cons, so it felt like a pretty well-balanced way to write and record. I've got a history on the engineering side of making a record, too, so for us to be able to get together as a four-piece and not necessarily rely on studio time or external involvement gave us a lot of freedom to develop our ideas before we took it to a third party."

Ryan nods in agreement. "And we also laid the groundwork on album one," he adds. "We had '100% Endurance' at the end, which left the door open for where we could go with the next record. It created this open-ended feeling because it deviated from the rest of the tracks and left a Disney-esque ending, which may have surprised people a bit. To me, it felt like quite a bolshie thing to do, but it worked."

"I remember when recording 'Dark Days', we didn't want anything but four-piece instrumentation on it," says Sam. "But then when we started recording 'The Overload' and ended up adding layers on layers on layers, I feel like a difference appeared there; I don't think it started on this record. We also only added bits during the recording process on the first album, but having Jay at the helm on this one, way before we were in the studio, we were already doing so much more."

"I think ever since 'Fixer Upper' went rogue and opened all those doors for us when it was meant to be a B-side, we've followed our intuition," says James. "By the time 'The Overload' came out, we were already in a place of refusing to second guess ourselves, and that's why we didn't try to make 'Fixer Upper' again, and that's why the new album isn't trying to make '100% Endurance' again. You can't make those songs cynically. We can't sit down and decide to write songs like that; we haven't really got any control over it - it's up to everyone else to decide.

"When you do interviews, and you put the album out, that's when you start thinking about the impact it's going to have, but actually, while that's important for ticket sales and end-of-year lists and convincing your label to let you make another album, it's not on your mind when you're writing. It's great collecting songs and having them all under your arms to dole out, and it's amazing to go all around the world and see that people have been impacted by the songs we've put out there, but it isn't something you can control."

That sense of increased scope is something the whole band are aware of, especially after touring most of the world in 2023. Last November alone, they played Iceland, the USA, Mexico, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Japan - not bad for a group whose first album campaign was lowkey enough to include an edit of the Sean Bean Yorkshire Tea advert which Jay made on his phone. "I was well chuffed with it; that's probably my best work!" he protests, to laughter from the rest of the band.

"Playing abroad is always pretty vibey," says James. "It's too good to not enjoy it, even if it's a smaller show than usual - the feeling of turning up somewhere like Baltimore and somebody coming up to say how much they love your music is incredible."

"New Orleans was my favourite," adds Ryan. "Probably my favourite place we've ever been, and also maybe the smallest show on that tour - it's just so good being able to play somewhere like that and have genuine fans come along who know every word. It feels unreal. On the other side of things, it can be quite punishing. In Hong Kong, I saw a hotel room, the stage, then the hotel room again - but the gig itself was great."

"It was mad, what the fuck!" says James. "What are all those people doing in Hong Kong waving their arms from left to right just because I told them to?! Honestly, I went full Robbie Williams at that gig; I loved it.

"The thing is, we've got our foot in the door with the UK now. It's like a game show - 'you've got the UK, that's in the bag, but do you want to try for the rest of the world?' - and it turns out that the rest of the world is really far away, and pretty big too," he laughs. "It's not a bad problem to have, but it does feel like a lot of places we've never been before want a slice of the Yard Pie.

"What is nice though is that we've now attained a level of success where we can tour at a level which technically every human being doing a job deserves," he adds. "Because the music industry doesn't seem to function under human rights laws, that isn't a given. Instead, you have to do shit stuff that's really hard for ages and ages, and then - if you're lucky - you get given what you want on your rider. For us, that's Quorn ham, hummus, eight non-alcoholic Guinness, and some whiskey for Sam. Now, that's luxury. Maybe album three will mean we can relax and breathe a bit more, but for now, I'll settle for the ham.