“I’m irrelevant!” James Smith repeats at the climax of The Incident, midway through his band Yard Act’s debut album. In fact the Leeds frontman finds himself in the thick of a new wave of words-first post-punk bands that extends from the impassioned sloganeering of IDLES and brooding poetry of Fontaines D.C. to the bizarre bitterness of Sleaford Mods and outright surrealism of Dry Cleaning.
Smith speaks rather than sings, and is funny. He’s the latest in a line of wry northerners skewering their surroundings that includes the Pulp of Common People, the riot predicting Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys back when they were writing about being lairy lads out and about in Sheffield. The band grabbed early attention with their single Fixer Upper, a spiky satire about gentrification on which a Partridgesque character called Graham brags that “Two homes and a Rover comes from hard graft.”
