There seems to be a trend in popular music lately where artists are making songs as short as humanly possible in order to pile on the streams and stack up the number of plays. No one, and we mean absolutely no one, has brought Yard Act into this scheme.
Or maybe, more likely, the British band simply DGAF, as late last week they dropped a new single called “The Trench Coat Museum” — and the damn thing still hasn’t stopped playing. The track clocks in at more than eight minutes long, and feels like a throwback to the post-punk disco of yesteryear when all we wanted to do is dance, and had the extended mixes to do just that.
“The Trench Coat Museum,” all of it, is billed as a “lyrical study on ego, vanity, perception, and legacy,” and serves as Yard Act’s first new music since breakout 2022 album The Overload. And it also reflects Yard Act’s James Smith reacting to reaching a level of visibility through the buzz around his band.
“Criticism is fair game and the internet is lawless so you gotta take it as it comes, but I definitely stopped searching for myself on Twitter the day I read that someone wanted to punch my lights out,” Smith admits. “‘The Trench Coat Museum’ is about how our perception of everything shifts both collectively and individually over time at speeds we simply can’t measure in the moment. Within whatever space in society we occupy, we often see our own beliefs as being at the absolute pinnacle of what should be the ‘cultural norm’ and whilst the completely human trait of being self-assured can’t be helped, it’s an absolute hindrance on our collective process. We are one etc. (Are we fuck).”
Dance, for a while, below.