Years after meeting each other on the set of Peaky Blinders, Cillian Murphy and James Smith are both having great 2024s. Murphy is set to snag a Best Actor award at this year’s Oscars for Oppenheimer, while Smith and his band Yard Act have just side-stepped the sophomore slump on Where’s My Utopia?—a mighty fine one-two-punch for the continent of Europe this winter, I’d say. While vocalist Smith previously played in a band called Post War Glamour Girls and bassist Ryan Needham rocked out in Menace Beach, their “supergroup”—formed with guitarist Sam Shipstone and percussionist Jay Russell—remains their strongest endeavor yet, as the band has found fans in Elton John and Ed Sheeran in the half-decade since forming in West Yorkshire. At the dawn of 2022, Yard Act made meticulous waves with their debut album, The Overload, a 37-minute fire of ambition and angular, riotous songwriting that landed them as our first Best of What’s Next pick of that year.
After grabbing a Mercury Prize nomination alongside Harry Styles, Wet Leg and Little Simz in 2022, Yard Act dropped an eight-minute heater called “The Trench Coat Museum” last summer and it appeared to signal that the band was shifting towards an even groovier dance-inspired faction of punk rock. And, while “The Trench Coat Museum” finds no place on Where’s My Utopia?, Yard Act certainly used it to help shape their new 11-song badge of experimentation and funnel post-punk, post-Brexit grit into a container of hip-hop, funk and garage-rock—and even more so than they ever did on The Overload. At the album’s core, it’s not really an album at all, to be quite frank with you. No, Where’s My Utopia? very much brandishes the soul of a rap mixtape—featuring dexterous sampling and interludes that make this project scratch and soar in ways that few of their peers’ records have in recent memory.
The upgrade is not nearly as noticeable sonically. Instead, the transformations are measures of confidence more than anything else, as Smith, Needham, Shipstone and Russell sound more aggressive with their approach to songcraft. They scrap and serve and claw, aiming at a shading that never quite colors itself with performance or hollowness. Thinking about the discourse around recent AI-assisted music videos made by punk bands like this one and that one, or their gestures of flattened, love-bound monotony, Where’s My Utopia? doesn’t arrive hellbound on making any kind of statement lacking the nuance needed to transcend beyond a surface-level faux pas. Yard Act may have been born out of the aftermath of one of Britain’s worst economic referendums ever, but they aren’t here to fill you up on slogans or half-baked ideas. Where’s My Utopia? is exactly as the title suggests—a lot of questions about the overarching harm that one album cannot possibly answer.
Where’s My Utopia? cracks open with MF DOOM-style sampling on “An Illusion”—which was, along with the entire album, produced by Gorillaz drummer and producer Remi Kabaka Jr. The song boasts a bluesy guitar riff and dreamy chords in spurts, but the soul of the instrumental is sparked by a droopy, wet bassline, choppy backbeats and Smith’s mellowed-out portrait of dissonance (“Before I came here, I used to have an aim / All it takes is a little recalibration to remind me I used to have a name / All it takes”). “I’m in love with an illusion,” he sings. “Once the wheels are in motion, swear I’ll join the revolution. And I’d hang my head in shame but, for the weight it bears, would see to it I don’t look up again.” The track trudges like it was sautéed with some Demon Days grandeur, likely a cause-and-effect of having Kabaka behind the boards—but “An Illusion” never sounds like a pastiche of the animated band’s work. It’s unequivocally Yard Act, which is attributed to Smith’s unique bravado and the band’s ability to pillow his language with their in-sync, off-the-wall musicality.
The funk and fun of “We Make Hits” is the band’s self-proclaimed “ode to friendship,” as the track arrives shot out of a cannon and aglow with revival riffs underscored by liquid bloops from Smith’s SP404 sampler. With an endearing energy of underscored companionship (“We make hits, two broke millennial men, and we’d do it again,” Smith yells out. “Every night on the back of the bus, you know it ain’t no fuss, we’re on the same wage and we ain’t afraid to get paid on the stage”), the song also stands in as a searing critique of everything from subletting flats to bands riding the coattails of dead torchbearers’ legacies to, yes, Nile Rogers. There are some glints of auto-tune, spoken-word interludes from Smith that would make Alex Turner rethink his own poetic jargon. For all of the creative wealth The Overload granted Yard Act two years ago, it seems that the band is not interested in squandering it. And they’re doing it with a wink, merging the confusion with genuine humor (“When we were done kissing / We finally formed this band / And we signed to a subsidiary of Universal Inc.”).
“Down By the Stream” is one of Smith’s best lyrical displays yet, as every verse plugs the listener into an autobiographical (or, if not, a densely psychedelic fantasy) fit of storytime about a friend getting shot with a pellet gun and him bullying a mate. It’s pensively witty (“We wandered off into the woods behind the park with Dean’s older brother Mark, some cherry cola can bongs down the stream,” Smith rap-sings. “I wore these beige chinos, swore they were just cream jeans”) and deeply honest (“He spoke a little slow and I was a prick about it / And I bullied him because, well, don’t know why / But I did and I’ve gotta live with it”), weaving between drugged-out innocence and sober adulthood and backed by a Cypress Hill-style backbeat.
Following a sublime sample, “The Undertow” checks in from a similarly mature place, considering the price of guilt through the colorless uniformity of labor. “Are we born for nothing if we die alone?” Smith questions. “Only God can answer, so where’s my telephone? Did someone snip the wire? Didn’t pay that bill? Well, you know God loves a trier and I’ve got time to kill.” The song flashes a bevy of strings from Zahra Benyounes, Guy Button, Francesca Gilbert and Maddie Cutter and calls it a day with a searing, robust guitar outro and a choir of high-pitched goddess wails from Angel Silvera, Adeleye Omotayo, Michelle Ndegwa, Petra Luke and Rebecca Freckleton.
Where’s My Utopia? is tongue-in-cheek and refreshingly introspective. It is one thing to lament the empire; it’s another thing completely to do so without considering our own complacency within it and how that can gnaw at us. And, often, our own self-referential despair is rooted in the world capitalism demands we live in. Yes, because of climate change we are royally fucked. But, what if we were royally fucked and had some pals by our side as the ship goes down? On “Dream Job,” a dashingly catchy and plentifully rapturous dance track that takes cues from LCD Soundsystem, Smith gets to the root of this imbalance. “Welcome to the future, the paranoia suits ya,” he sings. “And step into my office all night long. It’s ace, it’s class, top, let’s move.” There’s such a charming muscle being flexed here that you might not even immediately realize that, beneath massive hooks, Yard Act are performing an exorcism on the ever-so universal fixation creatives have on shit-talk outmaneuvering praise.
On “Petroleum,” Yard Act channel Modern Guilt-era Beck and, through a rhythm bolstered by Needham’s moody bass, Russell’s drum programming and Shipstone’s lead guitar howls bend the melody while Smith intones like the “post-punk poster boy” he so charismatically goes on about a few tracks prior—keeping perfect, jittery pace with the song’s chopped-up imperfections. Yard Act are a human metronome collective that also happen to make some of the danciest rock music you’ve heard in a minute, and “Petroleum” angles between rave-ready techno clutter and early-aughts garage-rock revivalism. The product is catchiness overhauled with disillusionment. “My bones burn and the brain that’s controlling them knows that the soul needs petroleum,” Smith contends. “That’s how it goes, and if I knew how to control it, I would.”
The back-half of Where’s My Utopia? is where Yard Act take real ambitious stock of their once-dependable post-punk. They throw big hooks at big, anxiety-ravaged cracks and unfurl nearly all of them. “When the Laughter Stops” is melodic post-punk colored by distillations of ageless French House and dance-punk, and the band calls upon vocalist Katy J Pearson to help fill out the song’s shape—and her contributions are magnetically complimentary to Smiths’ unbothered snarl. “Don’t let no one ever know about the burden that you’re smuggling,” Pearson sings. “You dry your eyes at the gate to hide the struggling.” The guitar riff is vibrant and the percussion tumbles like a speedball until the song catches its breath with some keyboard focus. Measure it with the rest of the album and it’s clear that Yard Act never intended to make Where’s My Utopia? without pressing their foot firmly on the gas pedal.
At seven-and-a-half minutes, “Blackpool Illuminations” is the album’s “Trench Coat Museum,” oscillating between serving as a poetry reading and an orchestra performance. Smith recites a memory of going to see the titular illuminations in England with string set-pieces augmenting his flow—as he runs us through vignettes of busting his lip from falling off a radiator pipe, giving up on caring at age six and the dejected aftermath of losing a childhood wonder of curiosity. Smith gets a bit meta at the song’s end, as a voice chimes in and asks him: “Are you making this up?” “Eh, some of it, yeah. Why?” Smith replies. “Well what are you doin’ that for?” the voice claps back. Smith doesn’t hesitate: “I just didn’t want to burden anyone with the truth.”
But it’s the truth—no matter how stretched and emaciated it becomes—that defines Where’s My Utopia? and its generously familiar pastoral of nebulous grief, capitalism’s cyclical abuses and the anxieties of being a member of the first generation tasked with living and dying at the hands of a climate change made more doom-trodden by oligarchical and neglectful systematic authority. Even then, Smith, Needham, Shipstone and Russell try to glean smithereens from their blows; “I wanna buy a few acres, live off the fat of the land,” Smith, Silvera, Omotayo, Ndegwa, Luke and Freckleton harmonize on “A Vineyard for the North.” “Cap in hand, I stand before her. Mother nature, bring me water.”
Yet, a question remains: Where is my utopia? As the record concludes, Yard Act are very much still figuring it out. While seeking that answer, though, the band embraces the one thing everyone else runs away from: failure. When it’s all said and done, the tensions and queasy measures of worry Smith and his bandmates are left to reckon with fall trapped beneath the boot of endangered hope. Smith questions it best at the end of “Blackpool Illuminations”: “Why the fuck was I still wondering what wankers would think of album two?”
Watch Yard Act perform at The Pershing in Austin, Texas in 2022 below.
Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.
