A cast of lager-swilling characters populates UK post-punk revivalists Yard Act’s songs. On their Mercury-nominated 2022 debut album, The Overload, frontman James Smith took on the perspective of a small-time estate agent who had given up on his dreams of being an international footballer, a greedy landlord named Graeme, and even Yard Act’s own critics, while casting Harry Potter actor David Thewlis to replace him in the “100% Endurance” video. But on the band’s second album, Where’s My Utopia?, Smith turns the focus of his spoken-word lyrics on himself.
His lens has been shifting for a while: In the interim between albums, the band released “The Trench Coat Museum,” an eight-minute caper in which Smith mused on the history of the military-inspired outerwear—a post-punk trope he had in fact recently given up, having come to see something cartoonish in the image it projected. “That’s the thing about pop culture,” he said: “Oversized characters get more attention. I was ready to step away from that because I didn’t want to be trapped by it.” Although Where’s My Utopia? ostensibly began as a concept album about one of U2’s roadies, Smith eventually abandoned that framework—as well as the arch satire of the first album—in favor of vulnerability and candor.
Smith’s self-reflection is bolstered by a more confident, free-roaming sound. Recruiting another oversized cartoon character in the form of Gorillaz’s Remi Kabaka Jr., who handles production, the record fizzes and grooves with fresh energy, borrowing strokes from hip-hop, Afrobeat, and funk. Where Yard Act were previously best known for snarling post-punk minimalism, here they lean into a bass-driven strut on “Dream Job,” are buoyed by waves of bubbling synths and children’s voices on “Grifter’s Grief,” and bask in the sunset glow of powerful backing singers on the rapturous “A Vineyard for the North.” At every turn, they’re more ambitiously lavish, sounding less like their fellow British post-post-punks than genre-spanning contortionists like Beck, LCD Soundsystem, and Gorillaz. But Smith’s lyrics retain their gritty realism in casually evocative storytelling that lands somewhere between Jarvis Cocker, Mike Skinner, and your mate in the pub. Smith’s vivid observations often seem designed to undercut the record’s luxurious production: In one vignette, over a beachy flourish of guitar, he relays dropping a saliva-coated candy on the floor as a child, and the disappointment of finding it inedible, covered in old crumbs and dead skin.
Even when they take themselves more seriously, Yard Act are never self-serious. Despite the fact that it primarily focuses on the pitfalls of living your “dream job”—hardly new territory for a breakout band’s second album, whether self-aware or not—Where’s My Utopia? manages enough genuine pop finesse and laugh-out-loud punchlines to keep the cliché from grating. On the boisterous “We Make Hits,” Smith traces the band’s origin story, poking fun at their willingness to sell out with an anthemic, hand-clapping chorus that joyfully appropriates the maximalism of indie sleaze. (And if it isn’t an actual hit, Smith hedges, “We were being ironic.”) The more downbeat, grunge-y “Petroleum” addresses an infamous 2023 incident in which Smith turned on his unreceptive crowd during a show at the UK seaside town of Bognor Regis. It may not be the most sympathetic premise—successful rock frontman belatedly feels bad for slagging off his audience—but the song’s relentless groove and layers of Auto-Tuned vocals tell a bodily tale of the anxiety of maintaining a public image.
Where Smith is most compelling, though, is where he turns his attention to knottier subjects that resist simple resolution. On “Down by the Stream” he looks scathingly at his own history as a childhood bully over a clattering hip-hop beat. Halfway through, the song breaks open into a cavernous, beatless reflection on the cycle of abuse, bristling with confusion, anger, and regret. The record’s apex is “Blackpool Illuminations,” Smith’s spoken-word tale of a childhood injury sustained at the northern English seaside town’s annual seafront light show. At over seven minutes long, winding through jazz flute, taut funk bass, and cinematic strings, Smith’s existential magnum opus takes a whistlestop journey from his own childhood to his new role as a parent to his son.
“Are you making this up?” asks an incredulous therapist, also played by Smith, toward the end of the song. “Er, some of it, yeah, why?” he responds. Smith may have abandoned his trench-coat persona in favor of a more honest self-portrait, but the line between the authentic self and the larger-than-life character remains provocatively fuzzy.
