In time, Smith learned that certain steps could be taken to ground him. He stopped drinking and the whole band started running around, trying to regain a sense of daily routine in whatever city they were in. Shjipstone describes the band's emotional state at the time as similar to David Foster Wallace's writing of sports memoirs, where champions often reduce any previous achievements to dust in pursuit of the next victory. “If you sit back and think back and say, 'Oh, I've come a long way in my career,' you're dead. And I feel like there was something like that that year. just close it and do the thing. Don't look at the bigger picture.”
Being signed to Island, nominated for a Mercury Prize and receiving comments of approval from Hayley Williams, Fugazi and Beck himself can make a band feel over-stimulated – or over-the-top. The truth about the Yard Act seems somewhere in the middle. When working with Elton John to re-record their song “100% Endurance,” Smith surprised himself with how natural the interaction felt, just another day at work.
“Despite how underappreciated I can be, how often I feel like I lack confidence, he was crazy that when we actually sat down in the studio with him, I was like, 'Right, he appreciates me,'” she says. . “And I appreciate him, so let's do a song together.”
“It's just two people in a studio, doing their jobs that they're both good at,” agrees Needham, eliciting a grateful look of understanding from his partner. The moment lingers for a millisecond before it's quickly punctured by a joke. “And by that, I meant me and Sam.”
Learning to take the piss out of themselves is at the core of Yard Act's transition into the second album. Enthralling me with the myriad ways the rock'n'roll lifestyle is never as glamorous as it seems, Smith is never far from an informed report, eye-roll or theatrically exaggerated sigh. He chuckles under his breath as he describes situations that, as everyone around the table knows, are the very definition of major label trouble. “I was telling my mom the other day that I had to do four photo shoots in one day, and she was totally sarcastic, like, 'Oh, that must be hard.' So now mom thinks I'm a whining pussy too.”
Sarcasm has always been their lyrical forte, the kind of quintessentially British humor only enhanced by the increasing concentration of recurring characters in their songs. In 2023, Yard Act ventured further into the post-songwriting universe with the release of “The Trenchcoat Museum,” an eight-minute dance-punk odyssey that pokes fun at Smith's inadvertent outfit on stage. While it didn't fit the record, “Trenchcoat” signaled a rebirth, a way for them to let their musical influences roam with more freedom than their debut allowed. Where their debut was a realistic exercise in minimalism to be able to cheaply and easily recreate the songs live, it had its own limitations: “Even if the beats came from an Afrobeats or hip-hop track, I think people just I saw four white dudes with rock instruments and spoken vocals and I assumed it was post-punk.”
