Watch Yard Act play the clowns in new video for ‘When The Laughter Stops’ featuring Katy J Pearson

nme.com:

Yard Act have shared a new single called ‘When The Laughter Stops’ featuring Katy J Pearson – check out the video below.The song is the latest preview of the Leeds band’s second album ‘Where’s My Utopia?’, which is due for release on March 1 via Island (pre-order/pre-save here).“The sentiment of the lyrics gets to the heart of ‘Where’s My Utopia?’ almost immediately, and finds the cynicism first spawned from the same circumstance I found myself in during [2023 track] ‘Dream Job’ now giving way to a more genuine sliver of misery,” explained frontman James Smith.“Fortunately – spoiler alert – I’ve managed to find a way out of this pit, for the time being.”He continued: “Whilst the lyrics came quick, musically it went through the wringer.

As is often the case when Ryan [Needham, bass] presents a bassline, harmonically it’s pretty ambiguous and we all hear things differently.“I was hearing the song in a pretty bluesy, minor key, whilst Sam [Shjipstone, guitar] heard a very saccharine and sweet major key tune.”Smith went on to say that ‘When The Laughter Stops’ then “pedalled back and forth”, with Yard Act using ‘Lovefool’ by The Cardigans as a reference point “quite a lot” during the writing process.“During a recording session in Kettering with Russ Russell at Parlour Studios in December 2022, I was fucking about on a Roland Juno with the arpeggiator whirring away over the end,” he added.“Ryan flipped the rate so it went half-time and all of a sudden the eeriness of the track made sense; it sounded like some John Carpenter doomsday clock countdown or something.“Sam reworked the guitars to sound like ‘High Voltage’ by Electric Six and we stripped away the funkier percussion and made the rhythm more aggressive, like ‘Seven.