James Smith is a man who knows his crisps. Or so he thought. The Yard Act frontman has spent the last 15 minutes trying to remember a brand of ready salted he once ate in the ’90s. “It really freaked me out. It was the wrong colour but I can’t remember the name – it was the one that had a diamond on the front,” he broods, sitting in the Meanwood Tavern, Leeds, with bandmate Ryan Needham.

He’s talking about their new song ‘Blackpool Illuminations’, which tells the story of a six-year old Smith smashing his face on a window ledge in a Blackpool B&B. Though his dad bought some ready salted crisps to calm him down, things backfired when Smith noticed the packet was blue. Learning that crisp colour codes “aren’t gospel” was as much of a shock as all the blood, he says.

Yes, it was just a bag of crisps, but it fascinated Smith how trauma could isolate certain details so strongly, causing him to recall the day with much more significance than either of his parents did. “I’ve caught myself doing this so many times,” he says. “The same stories make sense until you start rehearsing them. You get better at telling them, but your version of reality is not how it happened.” It’s one of many moments on Yard Act’s new album Where’s My Utopia? that finds Smith second-guessing himself, trying to establish if he’s got the facts straight or been taken in by his own illusions.

Certainly, a lot has happened for Smith and Needham since forming Yard Act in 2019. Along with bandmates Sam Shjipstone and Jay Russell, they’ve enjoyed a wildly successful few years, including a No.2 album and Mercury Prize nomination – but success is something they’re still figuring out. “It’s been a learning curve, full of fuck-ups and wrong footings,” says Smith. “I feel like I owe everyone all the time for everything. But it’s good to be slightly submissive and fearful your career’s going to end at any moment.” Needham agrees: “I still half-feel like that. I’m waiting for everything to disappear.”

For now, though, there’s the new album to think about. While debut The Overload took shape during lockdown, Where’s My Utopia? was written deep into an 18-month tour. Surprisingly, it became a more insular record. “Being a helpless observer manifested itself into the first album,” Smith says. “This time we’d turn on the news in a different country and realise we couldn’t understand it anyway. So you tune out, get detached, and live in your own weird world.”

They worked with Remi Kabaka Jr. (Gorillaz), a longtime hero who encouraged them to indulge their wackier sides, bringing obscure records along to every session. As Needham recalls: “Remi’s main role was vibes. His energy really affected all of us. He gave me tons of confidence even just around the idea of being an artist or musician – I’m finally calling myself a musician because of him.” There was also the small matter of everyone being in the same room together, rather than trading audio clips via Whatsapp. “This time, me, Sam and Jay got so in each other’s pockets with playing. We just know intuitively what we’re all trying to do.” Finishing each other’s sentences? “Yeah! But with a bass guitar.”

Smith and Needham share that intuition too. Before they were Yard Act they were two chancers piecing together song ideas on a laptop; a time they celebrate in boyband pastiche ‘We Make Hits’. While the song’s lyrics are more kitchen sink than NSYNC, that world-domination ethos associated with boybands somehow doesn’t seem too far removed from Yard Act’s own trajectory; normal guys transformed into “post-punk’s latest poster boys” overnight. They’re joking, though. “That one’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s how we feel when we’re making tunes,” Smith says. “When it’s me and Ryan in the top room creating demos, we feel like we’re New Kids on the Block.”

Between them they’ve been in tons of bands, but Yard Act is the project they’ve poured their all into, and taken the most risks with. “Ryan has this voracious appetite for saying yes,” Smith explains. “The reason so much has happened for us is because Ryan chased it, embraced that ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ attitude. I’ve always been more reserved and less inclined to do things, out of fear. Whereas Ryan would drink confidence cans before emailing out Soundcloud links with 30 crap demos.”

“Yeah, I’d wake up hungover like right, let’s pop open my laptop and see what I did last night,” Needham adds. “Those 4am emails! Who even answers them?!”

Bill Ryder-Jones, as it turns out. He ended up producing debut single ‘The Trapper’s Pelts’. It marked Smith’s first attempt at the spoken word narratives he’s now known for, but that wasn’t planned. “Every other band I’ve been in I’ve had a guitar in my hand; all of a sudden I didn’t. The words became so all-encompassing they had to be spoken so they would melodically fit. I suppose that’s poor editing on my part.” Otherwise, the band’s set-up was dictated by whatever instruments they could squash into the back of a car. But even if the band’s post-punk sound came from necessity, it connected with listeners, and by 2021 Island was offering them a record deal. “We signed with a major label so I could feed my baby,” James reflects. “But it also means if we want a gospel choir and string section on the album, the label goes okay, here’s the money.”

Despite being suddenly better off, their approach didn’t change too much when recording their second album – it turned out cobbling together laptop demos hadn’t been a cost-cutting measure but their modus operandi. “We learned that four of us huddled around a computer was still just as fun. There’s no need to be primordial with your approach and play the same thing 32 times, you can just edit.” Many elements survived into album two: the disco-punk basslines, the samples, the sprawling monologues sparked by overheard remarks and stretched into full character studies. This time samples became a way of tethering themselves to life outside the studio – from the rapturous applause which kicks off the album, to Macbeth soliloquies and cut-glass British accents discussing current affairs. “Using samples and political references became symbolic – the outside world puncturing our reality,” says Smith. “A lot of the time we’d put samples in, write around it then pull the sample completely. It became like a writing prompt, to build a song around a skeleton then remove the skeleton from the body.”

Where their early songs featured recognisable antiheroes like the “school-of-hard-knocks” neighbour Graham in ‘Fixer Upper’, the voice on this record is more recognisably Smith’s, though he cloaks his confessions in humour. “You could go too far and descend into novelty at any moment,” he notes, “but that risk is what makes it exciting. It’s easy to be cool and aloof, to stare into the distance and play your no-wave chords, but to be honest about how fucking daft you actually are, it’s more vulnerable, and maybe that’s what resonates with people.” It’s the same whether he’s channelling his own insecurities or the rants of someone he met down his local. There’s surely an irony to finding your own voice through other people’s soundbites? “I think the funniest thing about all those characters is that they were me all along. The whole first album is about a man in his late 20s/early 30s who jacks in his ideals and dreams to become an estate agent. But the estate agent was me signing to a major record label. I just didn’t have the confidence to write as myself.”

So he wrote knowingly flawed characters, always intending their humanity to shine through the cracks. He’s not convinced he’s achieved this, or if listeners are interested in hearing both sides. “A lot of people want to cartoonize society and make it really black and white,” says Smith. “They want heroes and villains and clearly-defined lines in the sand. They want to remove the human element, they want caricatures.” But Smith’s hard-bitten observations rely on a dash of romanticism; there’s a pathos to his portrayals of these slightly bigoted everymen dreaming of times gone by.

And then of course there’s Smith himself, who is nearly as nostalgic as the cranks he writes about. Like any millennial getting older, he’s charmed by memories of penny sweets, dial-up modems and all-you-can-drink indie discos, recalling the 1990s/2000s as an easier time. “We were very fortunate to grow up before the internet really took over,” he says. “You went out and you lived your life, you weren’t on camera or under scrutiny. The stakes are higher now.”

Obviously, he stops short of thinking of his youth as a perfect era. “In a world that’s so uncertain I understand why people rely on nostalgia, and there’s nothing wrong with comforting yourself. But when you get lost in it and start thinking the past is how the future should work, it becomes dangerous.” It’s just one of many seductive illusions haunting Where’s My Utopia?, another being the idea that fame can solve your problems. Both Smith and Needham are acutely aware of how ephemeral success can be, approaching Yard Act with the discipline of a day job. At times, Smith says, this doesn’t sit comfortably with being an artist. “People want a version of the truth that’s palatable and being a live band is a reflection of that. There are frustrations with not being able to be honest on stage because you’re trapped by job obligations to present a show.” Sometimes he feels more employee than frontman: “When people have paid to see you, you can’t let them down because everything revolves around money. It becomes supply-and-demand, customer service.”

Yet for Smith, the thought of becoming a swaggering prima donna is infinitely worse. He still tortures himself about a time he “threw in the towel” on stage in Bognor Regis, petulant with the audience and visibly irritable, an experience which sparked the track ‘Petroleum’. “It was the second show of the day, start of January. We’d piled back in the van still exhausted by the year before – I was feeling like shit and trying to quit drinking. Then we got to this incredibly noisy venue with the green room vibrating. I just wanted fruit and vegetables, but someone appeared with a Papa John’s pizza and I was like, I DON’T WANT TO EAT CHEESE AGAIN!!! It sounds so bratty, but I let it get the better of me, and I ruined the show.” He may not have been hauled into an office, but Needham did take him aside for a heart-to-heart in the carpark. While Needham remembers the episode with amusement, for Smith it was a wake-up call.

He comes across as someone afraid of letting fame go to his head, a fear which plays heavily into the lyrics. The protagonist of Where’s My Utopia? is a kind of doomed man of the hour, showboating one moment, shooting himself down the next. ‘Dream Job’ tries to find words for his compromised relationship with the music industry, only to settle for monosyllables: it’s ace, top, mint, boss. After all, there’s no easy way to describe the strange twist of fate that takes a band from sipping cans in Meanwood to duetting with Elton John.

As well as this, they’ve seen their profile rise in the US, “enough to keep us going on weird holidays and wondering who’s got a gun in their pocket.” They’ve played The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and enjoyed slots at SXSW and Coachella, where Needham recalls watching Smith waltz obliviously past Keanu Reeves, his plate stacked to the heavens with lasagne, Caesar salad, burgers, chips and Mexican barbecue. Otherwise, they don’t seem especially starry-eyed about where Yard Act has taken them. “When you tour places for the first time, people tell you how much you’re gonna love it,” Needham reflects. “Then you get there and have a beer, eat some ramen, it’s all kind of the same really.” Smith agrees: “It’s funny when hosts say they’re going to take you to this amazing burger joint with plywood walls and craft ales and you’re like, we’ve got this in Leeds!”

If touring has any thrills left, surely it’s the feeling of victory that comes from winning over a new crowd, the kind with its arms crossed ready to hate-watch the hype band. At least in Leeds that’s something they no longer have to contend with. At home gigs Yard Act crank things up a gear, like the five-day residency they put on at the Brudenell Social in May: a kind of variety show crammed with comedians, fellow musicians and Chumbawamba singalongs. If their fame dissolved tomorrow, maybe they’d be happy as a Brudenell house band. Until then, curiosity drives them as much as ambition. “I’d love to headline an arena, not because I want to bask in that sense of achievement – I just want to see how it would translate,” say Smith. “How do you get there doing what we do? That’s what’s interesting to me. I couldn’t give a fuck about sustaining it.” Admittedly, with their 20s behind them, there are some parts of being on the road they’d rather not revisit. “The kindness of strangers is important but it’s punishing. I don’t want to be broke, staying on student floors. I’m happy to go back to small venues as long as we can afford a Travelodge.”

So why, then, is this record so consumed with the fear of crashing back down to earth? No amount of cowbells or disco basslines can mask that dread creeping through Where’s My Utopia?, even if on the surface the songs feel as party-ready as Franz Ferdinand or the Rapture. Can you imagine if someone rewrote Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ but made it about “men whose fleeting failures were all they ever knew“? That’s what ‘When The Laughter Stops’ sounds like. ‘The Undertow’ is like Pulp but with the hedonism switched out for guilt about providing for a family. “Well, jadedness is coming isn’t it?” Needham shrugs. “You’re only in the good bit for a short space of time.”

During our interview, Smith and Needham talk a lot about burrowing into their own psyches, hiding out in studios and avoiding the outside world. But with release date approaching (1 March), they’re aware it’s time to surrender the in-jokes to strangers, and steel themselves for criticism. “It breaks me when I see someone shit on us in the comments, it’s really crushing,” says Smith. “But fair fucks. I’m sure some people probably want to knock us down a peg or two, and it’s fine.” Needham chips in pragmatically: “This sounds like a get-out clause, but I’m completely happy with the record, I wouldn’t change it. If you have doubts and people pick up on it, that’s where it fucks you a bit, but I honestly feel like we did the best we could. It is allowed to be judged.”

Even if it’s rooted in pessimism, Where’s My Utopia? finishes on a more hopeful note. ‘A Vineyard for the North’ was written after Smith learned about French champagne companies snapping up acres of land in England. What feels like a sobering indicator of global warning is also a last-ditch call to adapt, because that’s the only option we have left.

Yard Act themselves didn’t expect to thrive. “For a long time I was dismissive of making music because it felt like it wasn’t a necessity, but the more I think about how it has saved my life, the more I realise it’s beyond food, shelter and water,” Smith says. “Security isn’t promised, so it’s important to be as present as we can and have hope in the unknown. Despite how high the stakes are, despite how harrowing things can feel, the future is unwritten.” After all, without that willingness to move ahead, life would just be one long blooper reel, playing all our worst moments on repeat.