The teaser trailer for You’re Gonna Need A Little Music showed Yard Act’s famous old Rover going up in flames. It played less like an album announcement and more like a eulogy, and that’s roughly the mood the record opens in too.
‘Empty Pledges’ starts with James Smith declaring he’s got nothing new to say, then spends four minutes proving that’s not quite true: By now you’re either with us or you’re not, so you can sit down shut up and listen, or switch this shit off. It’s still Smith, still sharp, but there’s something different underneath it this time.
The band built their own studio in Leeds after touring 2024’s Where’s My Utopia?, then flew to Los Angeles to finish the record with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen, whose credits run from Beck to Wolf Alice. It’s the first time in three albums they’ve recorded together as a full band in one room, and the record sounds like it: heavier, tighter, more physical than anything they’ve made before.
‘Redeemer’ is the clearest proof. It’s the heaviest thing Yard Act have ever put to tape, an industrial grind that keeps building pressure until Smith’s voice cracks under it. Where The Overload found its power in wit, this finds it in volume.
The title track pulls the other way. Its piano, passed down through Smith’s family, gives the record its one properly warm moment, gentle enough to make you forget how hard everything around it is working.
That warmth is rare, though. ‘Fiction’ hides its real target behind an alter-ego called Janey, and the song ends up saying less than the band’s sharpest writing used to: You get one shot, so roll the dice, just put your foot down Jane. Some listeners have called it a highlight anyway, which might be the more interesting verdict: even when Smith obscures what he means, the tune still lands.
By ‘Talky Talky People’, Smith is complaining that other people never listen, several songs after he opened the record demanding exactly that of everyone else. Whether Yard Act clocked the contradiction or walked straight into it, it’s the most honest moment on the album.
Burning the old Rover wasn’t really a eulogy. It just meant Yard Act needed the space where it used to sit for something else: a studio, a room, a place to finish an album as four people rather than one voice out front. That’s the trade this record makes throughout, and mostly, it’s a good one.
