In time, Smith learned that certain measures could be taken to ground himself. He stopped drinking, and the whole band took up running, attempting to regain some sense of a daily routine no matter what city they were in. Shjipstone describes the band’s emotional state at the time as akin to David Foster Wallace’s writing on sports memoirs, where champions often reduce any prior achievements to dust in pursuit of the next win. “If you sit and think back and go, ‘Oh, I’ve got really far in my career,’ you’re dead. And I feel like there was a bit of that in that year; just close it off and do the thing. Don’t look at the wider situation.”
Signing to Island, landing a Mercury Prize nomination, and receiving approving comments from Hayley Williams, Fugazi, and Beck himself might make a band feel over-stimulated—or over-hyped. The truth for Yard Act seems somewhere in the middle. When working with Elton John on the re-recording of their song “100% Endurance,” Smith surprised himself at how normal the interaction felt, just another day at work.
“Despite how self-deprecating I may be, how often I feel like I’m lacking confidence, it was mad that when we actually sat in the studio with him, I was like, ‘Right, he values me,’” he says. “And I value him, so let’s make a song together.’
“It’s just two people in a studio, doing their job that they’re both good at,” agrees Needham, prompting a grateful look of understanding from his bandmate. The moment lingers for a millisecond before it is quickly punctured by a quip. “And by that, I meant me and Sam.”
Learning to take the piss out of themselves is at the core of Yard Act’s transition to album two. As they regale me with the myriad ways in which the rock’n’roll lifestyle is never as glamorous as it seems, Smith is never far away from a knowing air quote, eye-roll, or a theatrically exaggerated sigh. He catches his laughter under his breath as he describes situations that, as everyone around the table knows, are the very definition of major-label problems. “The other day I was telling my mum I had to do four photo shoots in one day, and she went all sarcastic, like, ‘Oh, it must be hard.’ So now Mum thinks I’m a moaning cunt as well.”
Sarcasm has always been their lyrical forte, the kind of inherently British humor that is only amplified by the growing assembly of recurring characters in their songs. In 2023, Yard Act went further into the meta-songwriting universe with the release of “The Trenchcoat Museum,” an eight-minute dance-punk odyssey that lampoons the inadvertent costume that Smith had been wearing onstage. Though it didn’t fit the record, “Trenchcoat” marked a rebirth of sorts, a way of letting their musical influences roam with more freedom than their debut had allowed. Where their debut had been a pragmatic exercise in minimalism for the sake of being able to cheaply and easily recreate the songs live, it had its own limitations: “Even if the rhythms were coming from an Afrobeats or hip-hop track, I think people just saw four white blokes with rock instrumentation and the spoken vocal and assumed it was post-punk.”
