Yard Act - The Overload - Album + Ticket (Stripped Back Instore & Signing)

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Exciting news Yard Act will be joining us in the shop on Tuesday 25th January for a short Stripped back set and signing starting at 4pm As you may know our shop is pretty tiny so w e only have a VERY Limited amount of space available for this show - All you have to do to Guarantee entry is pre order a copy of the album on any format below No tickets are being issued once ordered your name automatically gets added to our door list Albums can be collected from us any time after the release day on Friday 21st January Including the afternoon of the session Tracklisting:Side AA 1. The Overload2. Dead Horse3. Payday4. Rich5. The Incident6. Witness (Can I Get A?)Side B7. Land Of The Blind8. Quarantine The Sticks9. Tall Poppies10. Pour Another11. 100% EnduranceIn a world of great polarity, nuance is normally the answer. We may shameand bicker and amplify our outrage, but at the core of it all, we’re all stillinhabitants of the same ecosystem, most of us trying to tow the delicate linebetween empathy and self-preservation. If nothing and no-one is purely goodnor evil, true societal improvement can only come from recognizing some kindof middle ground. In many ways, Yard Act is a project that exists through the fusion of seeminglyopposing entities. Old friends in a new band, they seek out shades of socio-political grey, imbibing their stories with sharp, satirical spoken-word humour.Spearheaded by James Smith (vocals) and Ryan Needham (bass), the nowfour-piece, completed by Sam Shjipstone (guitar) and Jay Russell (drums),have built a sound that speaks inherently to their birthplace of Leeds, WestYorkshire, and yet ties together observations from all walks of modern Britishlife – the small-town bloke in the local pub, the anti-capitalist stuck at a deskjob, the tired activist in all of us torn between easy complicity and the desire tofight. Their sound and ethos might be progressive, but it’s not about pointingfingers so much as opening eyes. “Lyrically, I think it’s a record about the things that we all do - we're all sowired into the system of day to day that we don't really stop and think aboutthe constructs that define us,” says Smith. “But also beyond that, it's kind ofexciting, because there’s still so much we don’t understand; how a hivemindset is forged, how information spreads, how we agree and presumethings without thinking. Some people think more than others, but a lot of thissloganeering - I'm on the left, I'm not wrong - doesn't achieve anything.Gammons, Karens, Snowflakes, whatever – I find it all so boring. I';m just notinto that.” What Yard Act are into is ideas. Having grown from relatively casual pubacquaintances to housemates, Smith and Needham found living together tobe conducive to a high work rate, racking up demos in quick succession.Settling into a system of programming, looping and layering, the alchemybetween the two created a base from which to build their narrative world.“Ryan is a vibe guy, whereas I overthink everything,” laughs Smith. “It’s beenthe greatest creative partnership I've ever had. When you find a groove thatworks, it just kind of looks after itself.” With just three hometown shows under their belt, world events intervened. Butrather than letting the pandemic derail them Yard Act set up their own imprint,Zen F.C. and across the course of 2020 and into early 2021 released fourincreasingly coruscating, hilariously dark singles with ‘The Trapper’s Pelts’,‘Fixer Upper’, ‘Peanuts’ and Dark Days’ all securing BBC 6Music play, anddespite the circumstances developing a remarkable, ever increasing fanbase.“One of the first reasons we started the band, before anything even took off,was to play live because we had fun playing live,” says Smith. “but veryquickly, we realised that we just loved writing songs, and writing songs isn'tjust about jamming in a room and writing those long noodly songs. It’s amassive cliché, but we've always been influenced by pop music, and finding away to present it in a way that feels like ‘us’. The more people reacted to thespoken word thing, the more we felt encouraged; you can kind of hear how itgets more and more ridiculous as the singles came out. Positivereinforcement is how you explore and push the strongest bits to the extreme.And our extreme is just me talking loads — I'll talk until the track runs out! Far from the self-indulgent bluster that Smith jokes about, ‘The Overload’ is arecord of great dexterity and curation, the output of a band who were raisedon a 00s digital-revolution buffet of wide musical influences. Growing up onUS MTV Hip-Hop, minimal 70s No-Wave and sharp-witted British indie, YardAct benefit from this rich tapestry of musical near-history, using it to createsomething that feels like more than a trendy pastiche. “There are generationsof digital crate-diggers now that just absolutely love music and know how tonavigate it,” says Smith. “Old music becomes new music. It's made everyoneless worried about the now I think.” While time-travelling in parts sonically, ‘The Overload’ weaves a very-2021storyline. The group made the decision early on to leave ‘Fixer Upper’ and‘Dark Days’ off their album debut (“it sounds arrogant, but we felt we hadenough good songs without ‘em”), but the joyous specificity of their earlylyrical observation is still in fine evidence, plotting a visceral, satirical journeythrough capitalism and greed. Across the album’s 11 tracks, an unnamedcharacter – a bricolage of characters that Smith has met, imagined, or himselfbeen – finds himself in quite the financial pickle, ricocheting from desk job todesperate illicit activity to police investigation, before culminating in the kind ofhalf-cut personal epiphany that even the most law-abiding among us couldrelate to. Bookended by cheeky cameo’s from ‘Fixer Upper’s Graeme and aclear structure of four parts, there is no getting around it — Yard Act havewritten a soap opera. “At Ryan's insistence, the record was actually called ‘Yard Act The Musical’for a long time, but I've got a really weird relationship with musicals, as in Ifucking hate them,” deadpans Smith. “I don’t want to overthink it, but I do likeconcept albums, and I do think stuff works better when it's given time to begestated and let people pick at lyrics and think what they mean.”“We had about six standout tracks when we started thinking about an album,and from those, I saw a theme of money and capitalism, a sort of mockery ofit. It's basically just a man in their late 20s, early 30s, who's always tried tofight against the system, stood up for things that they believe in and had avery strong moral compass. But it kind of crushes them in as many ways as itmakes them happy – you sacrifice your beliefs for a life of comfortability, andstill have to carry the burden of that decision.” For a record of some potential heaviness, a dark sense of humour is integral.The record’s title track – its opener — plays like a raucous spaghetti western-themed night at the Hacienda, while ‘Land Of The Blind’s loose-swinging bassand jabbing guitars gives acerbic pace to its sordid tale of financialexploitation. The influence of post-punk is apparent, but the shackles of‘authenticity’ have been shaken loose - “I think we could all feel that this post-punk thing was getting tired; ‘Land Of The Blind’ felt like quite a pivotal song inswitching us away from what people thought we were.” Even through Smith’s openly cynical lens, the world isn’t an entirely cruel andhopeless place. As our character finds themselves in the reflective epitaph ofthe final three songs, they explore how they might have come to be; thenarcissistic peers they grew up with (‘Tall Poppies’), the Friday nights settingthe world to intoxicated rights (synth-tinged “Pour Another’), and then ‘100%Endurance’, a poignant, emotional release which finds some kind of freedomin the futility of it all, an opportunity rather than an oppression; “It’s all sopointless/ But it’s not though is it?” As a closer, it’s entirely pivotal for thejuxtaposition they’re trying to achieve. “When that came right at the end of the record, it felt like it really completed itby sounding different to the rest .” says Smith. “It’s a little bit like a slip of themask, which felt really important after a record of me being quite sarcastic,which I’m quite good at. It feels a bit like a gateway to where we can go.” Pulling off a debut album in a pandemic isn’t easy, but somehow, Yard Acthave made it work. Recording with Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius,Aldous Harding) at his Bristol studio, those prolific demos have beensharpened down into something that speaks to the times we live in, creating astatement of intent that survives on nuance – a record of retro influences,recorded in a modern way, that manages to poke fun at society withoutpunching down from a place of lefty superiority. ‘The Overload’ is a politicalrecord, but in the same way that all great observations of human nature are –a messy, complex, knowingly hypocritical snapshot of our current state ofplay. “I just hope it makes people laugh at the peculiarities of human nature,” saysSmith. “The world feels very heavy at the moment; it has done for a while, andwhen bad things happen, the weight of the world makes you panic, you wantto change everything like flipping a switch. But that's not how it works. All youcan do is plant seeds. I don’t think good and bad really exists, and I don't thinkyou can change people's minds any other way. “So that's what I hope, but I also just hope people can just enjoy it. And I hopeit lasts. I hope people like the detail - I think we can learn a lot about eachother through an observational smirk. Jenessa Williams Show more