“Norwich! We wanna consume you! Do you wanna consume us?” drawls singer James Smith with a grin on the first night of Yard Act’s latest UK tour. It’s a very Yard Act thing to do, drawing the audience’s attention to the transactional nature of gig-going; of band as product, of paying your money to jump around on a Wednesday night. Smith may also be hinting at the carnivorous aspects of fandom, the parasocial nature of the exchange that has always existed but feels even more acute in the internet age, where bands can doomscroll their haters’ disdain as the tour bus wends its way to the next posting.
Smith is definitely talking about the ineffable energies exchanged between stage and crowd, however: two bodies feeding off each other – a symbiosis that Yard Act do well, and are doing even better now that they’ve become a punk-funk outfit. The Leeds band came up during the pandemic, writing barbed slice-of-life songs about late capitalist exhaustion and the absurdities of trying to get by. They were a composite of many dry, serrated northern bands gone by: the Fall via Pulp, with a lashing of Gang of Four, dusted with their own hyper-specific reference points: misguided landlords, fetishised trenchcoats. Student music, but older and wiser.
