Yard Act Stretch Beyond Post-Punk on Third Album
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- Yard Act released their third album "You're Gonna Need A Little Music," marking a shift from wiry post-punk toward melody, groove, and dance-rock while retaining vocalist James Smith's cynical lyricism.
- Producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen — whose résumé includes Beck, Nine Inch Nails, M83, Air, St. Vincent, Wolf Alice, and Deafheaven — gave the band a broader palette, folding piano, funk rhythms, and electronic textures into songs that previously ran on angular guitars alone.
- The album is the first record all four Yard Act members wrote together in the same room, a process the review credits for a noticeably more spontaneous feel than its predecessors.
- "New Beginnings" and the title track are the album's biggest victories, with the band's expanded musical range doing the heavy lifting and Smith's lyrics frequently ceding ground to the instrumentation.
- "Thrill of the Chase" is called arguably the strongest track, its relentless rhythm section embodying Smith's critique of conformity and ambition, including the lyric about anyone trying to "get ahead of the colony gets a bullet in their head before they get an apology."
- Tracks like "Fiction," "Cherophobe Rock," and "Redeemer" fall flatter, leaning on repetitive hooks or generic rock that briefly deflate an otherwise adventurous record.
Why it matters: For a band that built its reputation on angular post-punk, the decision to write together in one room and hand production duties to Justin Meldal-Johnsen — a producer known for Beck, Nine Inch Nails, and St. Vincent — signals Yard Act are courting a wider audience rather than doubling down on their niche, even if a few tracks don't deliver on the expanded ambition.
