"YOU CAN'T JUST DO A CIRCULAR RIFF-BECAUSE IT MIGHT NOT MEET UP WHERE YOU NEED IT TO!"

None of what you’ll hear on Yard Act’s thrilling and stylistically audacious sophomore album is what you could call conventional, but on occasion it borrows from convention, perhaps just to leave armchair musicologists with a little mud to grapple around in in search of a label to pin on them. Those we had are out of date.

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Here we had the Leeds-based quartet down as a postpunk concern on the back of the urgent, wiry skronk of 2022 debut The Overload, and now along comes Where’s My Utopia? – all enigmatic and dynamic, the sound of a band whose sensibility has aggressively expanded, whose musical appetites have grown more adventurous from time spent together on the stage and in rehearsal rooms.

It’s not to say that it is wholly divorced from post-punk, but there is a more pertinent question to ask: is this a hip-hop record? Its production, overseen by Gorillaz’ drummer/producer Remi Kabaka Jr, bears some of the hallmarks of ’90s hip-hop, from the radio static breathing life into the album, and the vocal samples, down to the arrangements themselves. One key track, Down By The Stream, is animated by a jacking beat that sounds as though it was engineered by Ced-Gee on an E-mu SP-1200 sampler, and is given muscle from Ryan Needham’s bassline. And what all this musical radicalism does is grant Sam Shipstone permission to subvert melody entirely and set loose a little anarchy on his guitar.