‘We are very good. I don’t mean it to be arrogant’: Yard Act on bullying, hypocrisy and their new burdensome words | Yard Act

MeIt’s a new way to announce your return. On the opening track of Yard Act’s new album, over a chorus of strummed piano and jittery drums, singer James Smith declares: “I’ve got nothing – nothing new to say!” And it didn’t end there. Later in the same album, Empty Pledges, Smith promotes himself as an unabashed evangelist, saying: “Do you feel like an impostor with every new level you climb too?

Is it really refreshing to start painting by saying you don’t know what you’re doing – or ruining yourself? “Well, I don’t know if everybody he has something new to say really, “said Smith with a grin when I met him with bassist Ryan Needham in a London bar to discuss You’ll Need a Little Song, the band’s upcoming third LP. “We are in this age when everything should be a manifesto and a statement, but mostly it’s only one way. No one wants to explore the gray areas again. “

If Yard Act’s music suggests that self-doubt is the new braggadocio, then talking to Smith is no different. He fluctuates between confidence and anxiety, often backing down or confirming what he’s saying if he seems tired. Were those words too arrogant? Too stupid? Are they self-deprecating? Self-monitoring? Sometimes it’s like listening to someone having an intellectual argument with themselves.

On the new record, Smith also introduced an alter ego, Janey, for the same purpose. “Janey is the part of my brain that doesn’t stop thinking,” he said. “Part of me just wants to be satisfied in the moment, but Janey represents the part that thinks I should dream big.”

It can be exhausting to be inside Smith’s head, but this critical self-examination is why so many people connect with his band. Because let’s face it, who’s out there no constantly complaining about their place in this unstable world right now? Being a singer in a rock band might not be the most relatable issue, but social anxiety, existentialism, hypocrisy? Of course they are.

“On our first two albums, we just felt like we were winning a competition or something,” says Needham. “And I think a lot of professionals feel that way these days.” It took a long time for us to change and start thinking, ‘No, we are very good.

“It’s good to have a sense of self-doubt and self-doubt,” Smith said. Which is boring – because you want people to say they’re the best team in the world. When I thought we were the best. I think I’m living my faith without messing with Kanye. “

Guys, you may or may not be old enough to remember, you never talked like this. The dangerous situation of the music industry in 2026 is undoubtedly the reason: even the most successful artists like Yard Act, who had two top 5 albums and collaborated with the famous Elton John, are worried about financial security. The magic of the Yard Act is writing about it in a coherent way. “I think it’s because we still have a foot in both countries,” says Smith. “I don’t isolate myself from being people like other A-list celebrities. I think being in Leeds helps me a lot to be more open-minded.”

When Yard Act first emerged from the city during the epidemic, they were a post-punk powerhouse (guitarist Sam Shipstone and drummer Jay Russell round out the line-up), picking at the scabs of late capitalism. The writing was sharp and funny, compared to Mark E Smith and Half Man Half Biscuit. By their second album, 2024’s Where’s My Utopia, they had expanded their writing and writing style, Smith expressing his fear of becoming a father and revealing his childhood.

You will need a Little Song shows some changes. Recorded as a full band in the studio he built in Leeds (the first two were rolled together on the road by Smith and Needham using a laptop), it runs through several genres – Blur, Prodigy, disco house, desert Arctic Monkeys – as Smith explores vocal style. “There lies the rising chaos / While Rapunzel lowers your tires,” shouts the new Redeemer.

“I bought an oil painting on a whim,” says Smith. “That was a great way to open up my brain to all the things I trained it to do over the years as a musician.”

After all, they say, it’s their old song Highlights of Blackpoola seven-minute slice of childhood memory worthy of Mike Skinner, Smith felt like he was pushing the myth as straight as he could. “I’m tired of literal descriptions of music,” he says. “I wanted to remember what happened when I first started listening to music and I didn’t need him to explain it to me because I got something out of it. The lack of words is the best thing for me.”

Music including Tall Tales and Fiction deals with memory and how we look back differently. “The way we remember things is not the way they happened to others,” Smith said. We like to think that there is a universal truth but every now and then we see how two people remember the same thing differently. If two people can’t remember, how can the whole world?”

Smith has first-hand knowledge of this. On a popular track from their previous album, Under the Riverhe told the story of being bullied as a child. He was a bully – torturing a boy named Jono who had difficulty hearing and speaking. The song reveals: “He spoke slowly and I was upset about it… ‘Cause, I don’t know why, but I did and I had to have it.” It felt like his most honest writing. I’m asking if the caller has been contacted.

“Oh, we’re all friends!” He says brightly. Because of the music? “Yeah. All the guys from the song have been at the last three or four Manchester games. I’m in their WhatsApp group now. They heard the album and thought it was about them. The funny thing is Jono didn’t remember me being like that. He didn’t remember it being so bad when I look back, like, ‘Oh!

It must have been difficult to open – but worth it? “Maybe I couldn’t do it at that time. When I was in my 20s, it was easy. But I think ownership is important. We live in a society that punishes immediately and doesn’t want to start a conversation about our shortcomings.

A few days after we spoke, I was watching Yard Act perform a new show at a small London venue. It’s so packed I had to stand at a table on the balcony just to see. The energy of these new songs, and the way they create a moshpit at their peak, shows that, for all their nerves, the band feels completely rejuvenated.

Smith and Needham agree: things are still interesting, they’ll keep going. The minute it stops, he hopes to do something good and call it a day. Smith says: “I don’t want to get into a group of really interesting songs like this to tour. If the ideas don’t come, don’t do them. But we’ll keep going,” he smiles, recalling the opening lines of the new album, “because surprisingly, we still have something to say.”