Writing together in a studio for the first time, the band hit on a liberated, expansive, and often jubilant third album. “It was a really joyous time,” Yard Act’s James Smith tells Apple Music of making their third record. “It was everything I imagined doing music for a living would be.” That had a lot to do with how the Leeds band approached You’re Gonna Need a Little Music. Unlike their Mercury Prize-nominated debut The Overload and its follow-up Where’s My Utopia?—both of which had been made under time pressure, their songs written separately between band members and put together on laptops—You’re Gonna Need a Little Music found Yard Act working in a studio for the first time (their own in Leeds, a product of the success of their first two records). “We could just jam in the room together,” says Smith. “I was in a dream world. It was very freeing.” You’re Gonna Need a Little Music builds on the ambition of Where’s My Utopia?, itself a reaction against the more self-contained sound of The Overload. “I was starting to feel really trapped by those songs,” says Smith, “and I would never want to be boxed in.” You might hear shades of Beck and Blur (“New Beginnings”), The Prodigy (“Thrill of the Chase”), and even Serge Gainsbourg as Smith experiments with a louche lower register (it works: see the excellent title track or closer “Over the Barrel”). Then there are embraces of everything from disco to funk, jazz, indie, spoken-word storytelling, twinkling pianos, and off-kilter lyricism. Throughout, You’re Gonna Need a Little Music shifts between raw intensity and buoyant fun, and is the most successful iteration yet, says Smith, of the “polarities” that lie at the heart of Yard Act: their darkness and their “earnestness and optimism.” “The more we’ve done this, the more I feel like I understand who we are,” says Smith. “We’re naturally sounding more and more like ourselves.” Read on as Smith talks us through every song he and his bandmates—bassist Ryan Needham, guitarist Sam Shipstone, and drummer Jay Russell—made on You’re Gonna Need a Little Music. “Empty Pledges” “This and ‘New Beginnings’ were the first two tracks written for the record. We felt like we’d found the polarities of this album, and we immediately knew this would be the opener. It was written when I was coming to terms with four years of being away from Leeds, then coming back and seeing old faces and people whose perception of me had changed. I felt like an outsider in my own city. The lyric ‘I’ve got nothing, absolutely nothing new to say’ has been interpreted as my statement of the album, but it’s actually about old acquaintances asking me what I’ve been up to, knowing full well what I’ve been up to, and me just saying nothing. You don’t know where to start.” “New Beginnings” “The main influence was The Beta Band. We had a six-minute-long version that had a boom-bap beat in it, and when we took that out, it leaned very much into Beck and Blur territory. The first note is the same chord as Beck’s ‘Loser,’ which I put in as a wink. Justin Meldal-Johnsen [the album’s producer and Beck’s former bassist and musical director] didn’t notice at all! That man’s played the song probably a million times—he just thought the song reminded him of The Beatles. This is a song about making the most of whatever situation you land in. The lyric ‘spend your winnings’ was a direct nod to the fact that we bought this studio and suddenly, after four years, we realized we’d actually built something and gained something from it.” “Tall Tales” “The album is about multiple realities and this is the start of that story arc. ‘Tall Tales’ is starting to dip your toes in this other reality and your own beliefs being more powerful than the natural order. There’s also a musical arc on the record mirroring that: The first two tracks don’t have any synthetic sounds on them, but from here until the end of ‘Janey Said,’ there are more fictional and artificial sounds.” “Fiction” “This one was a lot of fun. With ‘Fiction,’ you’ve committed to your own reality. It’s about how you believe what you believe, so you tell everyone what you believe. But the alternative is not standing by your views. Every time I think ‘I know I’m right,’ I also think, ‘What angle have I not seen this from?’ But if you spend all your time going round the houses trying to see it from other perspectives, you end up in this fog. There’s no clear-cut answer—this record has a lot of that uncertainty.” “You’re Gonna Need a Little Music” “It came together so fast. We thought we’d written the album but were still going into the studio and just playing. I wrote the piano melody—the motif that runs through the whole song. Sam started putting chords underneath and Jay was doing this half-time drum beat. And then Jay put the disco groove on it. It was like there’d been an idea floating above us and we grabbed it. I hit on that really low register—we were laughing because it was really leaning into this sleazy character. The sentiment of this song encompasses the whole record.” “Cherophobe Rock” “One of my biggest pet peeves is art that takes itself too seriously. I can’t remember where I came across the word ‘cherophobe’ but it’s someone who’s scared of happiness, which is exactly what this song is about. We had this song for ages and had more or less discarded it—it didn’t feel very us and sounded a bit like an Oasis tune. Then Justin came in and ran this knackered little drum machine through it and made me sing through this distorted mic. All of a sudden, it felt really fizzy and frenetic and punky again. Ryan’s backing vocal also lifted this into an entire new space. I love that we’re getting to sing more and more together.” “Thrill of the Chase” “Ryan had written this almost drum ’n’ bass groove. We slowed it down and put live drums on, then Sam brought in these James Brown-style guitars. Sam’s guitar work across this record is amazing, but on this song particular, the way he’s moving between quasi-metal and ’70s funk is really special. I didn’t really know what this song was about, couldn’t get to the core of it. But then I lifted a line I’d written for another song—‘I can’t stand people/People who think they’re good people’—and it fell into place.” “Janey Said” “It’s the heart of the album. I felt like I’d taken spoken-word storytelling as far as I could after ‘Blackpool Illuminations’ on Where’s My Utopia?. Then this came out. It feels like, lyrically, it leans on what defined Yard Act early on, but musically, it puts it in a completely new world. We really treated the arrangement of this like a film score. This is the part where everything dissipates and you melt into the floor and come back to reality. We wanted all the instruments to be communicating with each other, and a reference for that was Wilco’s ‘I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.’” “Redeemer” “We released this as the first single because it felt like the biggest reset after Where’s My Utopia?. It was also a bit of a red herring. I wrote it with our keyboard player in our live band, Chris Duffin. We were working out of his studio one day. He had this piano and he’d Blu-Tacked all the strings to dampen the sounds—I started tapping out what would become the bassline on this. It was a very atmosphere-led track. Ryan’s dog, Grub, also makes an appearance—you can hear him barking in the back. It was fun to lean into this dark mood.” “Talky Talky People” “I was about to go home and went to see what Ryan and Sam were doing—they had recorded the little motif that starts this song. I had these lyrics on my phone and just read them over the top. Left it with Ryan, first take, and when I got back the next morning they’d kind of built it. Suddenly, we had this half-finished song. This track really caught us off guard—it was easy to write and fell out. It felt relaxed and very us.” “Over the Barrel” “This was the outsider on the album. We’d just knocked it out in an afternoon and forgot about it. But Justin really fought for it, and when we went back to it, it really found its feet. The ending very much became an expression of what the album had been to us, which was us playing in a room for ourselves. That last 45 seconds really sort of symbolizes the joy of us being alone, making whatever noise we wanted. And then obviously it ends with that little barbershop bit—that’s four Sams, singing in barbershop. It was a nice way to send the record off. Those last 45 seconds feel like how life does if you don’t slow down. Combined with the barbershop at the end it’s very much like, ‘Choose your own adventure. Slow down and break through or go mad trying.’”