The Overload

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Ollie Jacob (management, Memphis Industries):“From the band and management perspective I think we've approached it as if it's both the most and least important thing in the world. I think for us, the whole thing was undercut by a recognition that for a band like Yard Act, being involved in a chart battle is ridiculous. Which ultimately meant that, in amongst the hard work and effort, we were genuinely having fun.” Someone told Ryan that I said that his band was just a flash in the pan” laughs Smith, sipping his beer. “I don’t think I said it, but maybe I did.” It was at a party in 2018 where the two properly hit it off. “We were the last two there in the garden drinking cans and talking about our favourite records. That’s when I realised I really loved Ryan and he was a really nice guy.”

Here, Island president Louis Bloom, manager Ollie Jacob of Memphis Industries, plus the PR and promotions team at They Do, share campaign insights with Music Week…Perhaps the biggest weapon to drop on unsuspecting uncles would be Elton John’s glowing praise for the band. In last year’s Big Read, the legend described the band’s vocal approach as a different ballgame: “I can’t do it but I love it and I wonder how they do it.” I’m not interested in politics as much as people. It’s all social; it’s all human nature” – James Smith Staying true to their independent roots, the band are releasing through Island in tandem with their own imprint Zen F.C – the label through which they put out early singles, all of which disappeared before you could think about hitting the ‘Add to basket’ button. Perhaps that’ll happen this weekend at Leeds Festival (you suspect it won’t). Taking to the BBC Introducing stage on Friday (with Reading on Sunday), Smith sounds guardedly excited about appearing at a festival he first attended as a kid – even if he’s astonished that they’re sharing that stage’s bill with acts like the Mercury-nominated Berwyn, who he sees as far bigger than Yard Act. I’m not interested in politics as much as I’m interested in people,” he explains. “It’s all social; it’s all human nature. It’s looking at what divides us to figure out what connects us, and realising how alienated everyone is. The loudest, most confident voices in the room are usually the most frightened – that’s the Grahams of the world.”

Yard Act had the biggest physical sale of the week - how did you achieve such an impressive result? Homing in on the little things is important, because they go unnoticed but everyone is aware of them,” he says. “If you don’t look in depth at what we’re doing as a species on Earth, it can feel really harrowing and overwhelming because we seem so parasitic. It’s hard to see any good in the big picture. But if you look at the little details, you realise you can find a lot of amusement and wonder in the tiny things humans do. If we all just let our guard down a bit and look at each other properly, take into account where everyone kind of comes from and now they’ve ended up at the point that they are, that’s the way you undo this kind of tug-of-war that we’ve ended up in.” The Overdub is a reimagining of Yard Act's Mercury Prize shortlisted debut album The Overload. Yard Act approached legendary dub pioneer Mad Professor to create The Overdub, and the result is a spectacular and surprising reconstruction of their debut LP The Overdub, currently available on exclusive vinyl via Rough Trade.

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It’s this sense of creative abandon and humility that’s made Yard Act such a vital and fresh presence. Their debut album is always ready to transcend genres and throw in surprises – take the banging climax of playful ‘Payday’, which sounds like a LCD Soundsystem remix of ‘Three Blind Mice’. Though they’re willing to throw themselves into everything, they never lose sight of who they are, something that was instilled in Smith during his teenage years when he watched Yorkshire heroes Arctic Monkeys explode onto the scene. Smith takes on an impassioned, almost angry tone: “You have the ability to reframe your perspective and try to find empathy. If you can’t, then you can still decide whether there’s a better avenue to go down than shoot people down to make yourself higher up. I have a chance to communicate with the culprits of bad behaviour in this world. It’s not my role to appeal to everyone and look woke. It’s my role to try and explain that people could look at things from another angle.” OJ:“You have to remember that our biggest headline date so far is a Lexington, so there is huge scope to grow. With all our pre-festival UK shows sold out, and a massive festival season in the works, live is going to be a huge focus for us through 2022 and beyond. The way Alex Turner wrote lyrics around social observation definitely helped me grow in confidence,” he says. “To go into that amount of detail on specific objects, to make them seem poignant and profound was really cool. Before that, the music I was listening to wasn’t doing that. I never got into the poetry of The Libertines – that always felt too flowery – and with The Strokes, you could assume everything was set in a dive bar in New York.