Like other UK and Irish bands that are currently driving a post-punk revival – Fontaines D.C., Dry Cleaning, Wet Leg and others – Yard Act use spoken-word delivery as their music’s defining characteristic, be it about mundane observations or allusions to the roots of Brexit Britain. But the Leeds band, one of the scene’s fresher faces, are the sharpest of the bunch so far, with humour and gravity in healthy symbiosis.
On Thursday at Village Underground, they had their playful frontman James Smith to thank for engaging tirelessly with the crowd at the quartet’s biggest headline show to date. Smith’s energy helped bring characters from the band’s 2022 debut album The Overload to life. His between-song assertions, such as “we can change the world with a show”, also helped drum up feelings of a small revolution.
