For years, Paste has introduced exciting, up-and-coming artists to our readers. This is the return of The Best of What’s Next, a monthly profile column which highlights new acts with big potential—the artists you’ll want to tell your friends about the minute you first hear their music. Explore them all here.
Sloganeering can do more harm than good when there are nuanced problems to be addressed through artistic expression. We’ve seen that tragically play out in political theater time and time again. In some cases, when well-intentioned artists try to shout from the rafters about cataclysmic threats to our ways of life—like in Adam McKay’s anything-but-subtle satire Don’t Look Up—it can provoke agitation, rather than critical thought, amongst those who need converting. James Smith, vocalist and lyricist of the young Leeds post-punk band Yard Act, can see this delicate balancing act for what it is. While some of the other prominent bands of their ilk draw out their messaging in a similar way to McKay’s grand-scale “Things are fucked and now I’m going to tell you why!” megaphone blitzkrieg, Smith’s approach is a little more understated. If we’re going to keep up the film analogy, you could compare the world he creates on Yard Act’s thrilling Island Records debut The Overload to working-class British filmmakers Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. It’s all about addressing the decisions made at the top by showing their impact on the ground level.
“There’s a lot of ‘you’re with us or you’re not,’ and that’s not what I’m about,” says Smith as he and Yard Act bassist Ryan Needham discuss their plan of attack over Zoom. The way Smith sees it, his densely written character studies—delivered at the rapid pace of a printing press—are exercises in understanding the people around him and how the situations in which they find themselves are all connected in some way. With so many of the trusted political class and news outlets trying to stoke fear rather than foster unity, Smith says that he writes as therapeutic cleansing practice.
He also understands that if you are going to write about humanity in 2022 with any kind of success, it’s important to address the political divisions that hold it back. “You only know what’s in front of you,” Smith explains, “But over here [in the U.K.], It’s so overwhelming, what’s going on with the Conservative Party and the changes they’re making and the refugee crisis. It’s impossible for that not to feed into any song you’re writing in 2022 that’s about something other than your own feelings. If you’re writing outwardly, that’s gonna seep in, in some form.”
It’s this kind of respect for their listeners—and share in their outrage—that has already made Yard Act such a huge success in the U.K. in the short time they’ve been making music together. After a run of one-off singles including the bitingly hilarious “Fixer Upper,” the band collected these songs and released them as their debut EP Dark Days in 2021. Releasing it independently, the band was able to quickly move 3,000 copies of the EP through word of mouth. Their slinky, danceable approach to the early Rough Trade Records sound, mixed with Smith’s commanding joke-a-minute lyrical style, rushed them into the limelight with a coveted slot at last year’s Reading Festival and a performance on Later… with Jools Holland. And the title track on the new record, “The Overload,” is included on the FIFA ‘22 soundtrack. Yard Act’s rise to becoming the toast of the town has certainly seemed meteoric.
But it’s not like both Smith and Needham haven’t been on the post-punk grind for sometime. Smith was previously the guitarist and co-vocalist for the group Post War Glamour Girls and Needham played in Menace Beach. It was only recently when the two got together to bounce around ideas on Smith’s four-track recorder that they landed on the modus operandi of the new group. “We’re going to use my four-track to be Leeds’ answer to Guided by Voices,” laughs Smith, who cites mimicking Robert Pollard’s free-associative poetry on the Bee Thousand classic “Hot Freaks’’ as an “a-ha” moment for the recipe they use today. Rather than leaning into the lo-fi pop of bands like GBV, or adding to the future landfill of talk-singing Mark E. Smith disciples of tomorrow, Yard Act’s ace in the hole is the influence of hip-hop, which not only informs Smith’s delivery, but also the way he and Needham build their compositions before presenting them to their bandmates, drummer Jay Russell and guitarist Sam Shjipstone.
Since Yard Act largely formed during the pandemic, Smith not having the luxury of exploring his vocal range in a practice room or a studio also helped him to develop and gain confidence in his fiery spoken-word delivery. Needham would send Smith tracks to add vocals to, which he would do late at night after his wife had gone to sleep. “I think that’s where the spoken element came from, more so than me yelling in a practice room. I was in my spare bedroom and my wife was asleep upstairs. So I wasn’t going to start screaming. I was just talking away to myself, having a conversation with myself.”
According to Needham, any time he presents Smith with a bed of music for him to add a vocal to, chances are it’s either struck down, or mutated from its original form to accommodate Smith’s flow or narrative. Sections are treated like samples, leaving songs to take numerous stylistic shapes in short spurts. It’s an engaging process that made recording The Overload an exciting and unpredictable experience for the group, and for their producer Ali Chant. “The reason we went with Ali Chant as the producer was we were chatting to a few people and he just got back to us and was like, ‘I want to make a Public Enemy record.’ We were like ‘fucking hell, finally someone gets it,’” says Needham.
When you listen to Smith’s lyrical placement on the funky screed against the brainless decline of post-Brexit England “Dead Horse,” his attention to—and not indifference to—the beat propels the band forward in a way similar to Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods. He piles up rhymes like a flurry of jabs from a fighter punching above their weight class, or a hungry emcee trying to out-flow the odds stacked against them. “I do have bars, actually,” says Smith with a sense of pride. “I’m glad you’ve noticed that!”