Death is coming for us all, but not today
Yard Act - '100% Endurance' (The Overload - 2022)
I am more excited about the number of newish guitar bands active in the UK and Ireland than I have been for almost 15 years. The number surprised me; I feared two things would worsen matters. The pandemic saw opportunities to meet other musicians, hone your craft live or rehearse together were taken away - imagine what something similar robbing the world of The Beatles couldn't play almost 300 times at The Cavern between 1961 and 1963 or the 200 nights they played (for up to five hours) in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962. The other problem, which is more of an ongoing issue than a shorter extreme shock like COVID-19, is the ability of young people from all walks of life to play in bands. I touched upon this earlier in the year when we featured The Last Dinner Party, when I talked about the impact of a less sturdy safety net for young people robbing us of their creativity.
So, all that considered, I'm surprised I can talk about a group of bands who have released their debuts either this decade or the end of the 2010s. The likes of Wet Leg, The Last Dinner Party, Idles, Fontaines DC, blackmidi, Squid, Shame, Sports Team, Porridge Radio, Dry Cleaning, English Teacher and Black Country, New Road have produced seven Mercury Prize nominated albums between them (so far) and a host of excellent singles and moments. Today, though, I want to mention a band and their debut, also Mercury shortlisted in 2022. They have just returned with an album that leans further into the sound of the Third Wave of dance-punk1 that loosely ties these bands together. I’m talking about West Yorkshire’s Yard Act.
Yard Act's first few releases as independent singles were collated onto the EP Dark Days in 2021, and it was the track 'Fixer Upper' that stood out for the character Graeme, an amalgamation of people vocalist and lyricist James Smith said lived on his street growing up, but one thing we can deduce about this character and his frustration about Polish builders is that he very likely voted to leave The European Union in 2016 and added he was
Not a bad man at heart, he just sincerely believes he’s from a country and generation that achieved the apex of everything so therefore can’t ever be wrong about anything.
Graeme reappears in ‘100% Endurance’, the closing track on Yard Act's debut album The Overload, a song that, like some of our favourite closing tracks at The Run Out Grooves, goes some way to encapsulates the album's overarching themes - here the duality of existential angst and the power of human resilience.
The surface value narrative of these lyrics captures the morning after a wild night out. The narrator wakes up confused, unsure of where he is, whose sofa he's on, and what happened the previous night. The song then pivots to a moment of shared laughter about a news story revealing the existence of other beings and species across the universe. This leads to a philosophical reflection when we get the reveal that they don't know what life is about either.
Suppose we want to think about lyrics on being woken up by a bang2 as being a metaphor for the path to human existence and experience being a consequence that flows down from the Big Bang. In that case, we should take the whole song as a potent commentary on the human condition and replace a literal feeling of being hungover with an existential hangover of anxiety and dread inherent in human existence.
The lyrics subtly draw from Portuguese literary figure Fernando Pessoa's acceptance of insignificance in 'When Spring Comes' and the existential weight explored in Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I can also pick up shades of influences from the line "Everything has already happened, time is an illusion" of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, The powers bestowed on Dr. Louise Banks by the heptapods in Arrival and the philosophical utterings of former Detective Rust Cohle in the first season of True Detective.
Sonically, '100% Endurance' diverges from Yard Act's usual post-punk style by incorporating softer, melodic elements like the electric piano. This sound draws more from the narrative-driven style of the stories that Jarvis Cocker spun out for us in a hushed spoken-word style on Pulp tracks like 'David's Last Summer', 'Wicker Man' and most thrillingly on Different Class's 'I Spy'.
Across the album's back end, we have the seven-plus minutes of 'Tall Poppies' and the bleakness of 'Pour Another' priming us for a downbeat ending. Instead, there is a pushback against the notion of nihilism and embracing a hippy ethos to wave away Graeme's return from 'Fixer Upper' as he fancies taking up arms against the aliens who have disturbed his limited way of thinking. We could even lean into the idea put forward by Albert Camus that Sisyphus enjoyed pushing that rock up the hill once he had accepted with clarity that it was his role in life to do so. So we finish the album on an uplifting note like The Streets' A Grand Don't Come For Free or something that pivots our interpretation of the narrator's opinion on the subject from negative to positive, as on The Arctic Monkeys' 'A Certain Romance.'
We thought the album was probably going to end on ‘Tall Poppies’, and then, at the last-minute, Ryan sent this new demo over and it became ‘100% Endurance’. I wrote all the lyrics to a WhatsApp video loop of it playing on Ryan’s speaker in the studio. That is the audio we used on the recording. The first take I recorded on my computer that I sent to Ryan. It felt like we had finally figured out the album, which was interesting because when we went in that first week, we thought we might come away with four or five tracks and then see where we were at later in the year. We didn’t expect to finish the album in a week.
—via Apple Music
I'm not sure Smith's description above of how '100% Endurance' ended up closing the album can be described as a happy accident, but writing a piece on this record about a song that declares that death comes for us all, as the protagonist dies at a youngish age of cancer, is very different from this one, which challenges back, Syrio Forel style, that today's not the day.
As a postscript, for anyone not familiar with the band, album, or this song, it ended up being the fifth and final single released from it. This song references The Brudenell Social Club (Nathan's house) in Leeds as an anchoring reference amongst all the philosophy and aliens. It would then go back into space by having guest vocals and piano from, Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Elton John.
Vodcaster Middle 8 also noticed that IDLES and Yard Act's most recent efforts have taken this approach and produced an engaging YouTube video on the subject.
For a few months, I heard this as woken by a bank - assumed that he had to field financial questions on his phone in those drowsy and confused few minutes of his day.