Yard Act debut new album 'You’re Gonna Need A Little Music' in full at surprise London show

Yard Act played their forthcoming third album You’re Gonna Need A Little Music in full last night (Thursday May 7), performing the just-announced record top to bottom at Tottenham’s Unit 58 for a show only flagged to fans on the band’s mailing list.

The Leeds group announced the album earlier in the day alongside the ominous crash of lead single ‘Redeemer’. The warehouse gig was a one-off performance for subscribers.

They opened with the slow-building stream of consciousness of ‘Empty Pledges’ and then the Beck-nodding ‘New Beginnings’. Early fan favourites emerged quickly: the funk-tinged skulker ‘Fiction’ and the record’s title track, a piano-led moment the band played as a clear highlight with touches the crowd linked to Pulp.

‘Cherophobe Rock’ arrived with a propulsive, ’00s indie spirit before dropping to a wonky, Blur-like piano outro. ‘Thrill Of The Chase’ pushed the set into sharper territory, with frontman James Smith spitting out its crescendo — as close to rap as the band have ever come.

Ahead of ‘Redeemer’, Smith pointed the crowd toward the new video, which pairs him on screen with a crow. “I was lucky enough to get acquainted with a crow and the handler said I had a way with them, which is true cos I’m friends with four crows,” he said, then nodded to post-punk band Crows in the crowd.

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The record closed with ‘Talky Talky People’ and ‘Over The Barrel’, the latter featuring a dummy ending that returned to finish with a multi-part harmony. With the gear still assembled, Yard Act then moved into older material. The night wound down with debut album track ‘Dead Horse’, early single ‘Dark Days’ and, after chants from the crowd, an encore of ‘The Trapper’s Pelts’.

The live debut reflected how You’re Gonna Need A Little Music was made. The band — James Smith, bassist Ryan Needham, guitarist Sam Shipstone and drummer Jay Russell — recorded live in the room together for the first time. “The first two records were both laptop records essentially,” Smith said in a press statement about their previous work: 2022’s Mercury Prize nominated The Overload and 2024’s Where’s My Utopia?.

Yard Act will release You’re Gonna Need A Little Music on July 17 via Island Records.

For this album the band wrote “40 to 50 songs” in an “uninterrupted five month period”, then recorded with Nine Inch Nails bassist Justin Meldal-Johnson between LA and Leeds.