It’s a theme picked up – albeit with the winning caveat “it’s hippy bullshit, but it’s true” – on the closing 100% Endurance, both the album’s best moment and its most atypical. It isn’t the most complicated message – we’re all different, we can all theoretically get along – but it feels genuinely affecting and powerful in the context of an album so obsessed with divisions and spitting bile at the other side. “He wasn’t perfect but he was my friend / He wasn’t perfect but he was one of us,” offers Smith, before noting that the friend wouldn’t have liked the inscription on a commemorative bench, “because he wasn’t too bothered about long songs with loads of words”: Tall Poppies lasts nearly seven minutes and its lyrics cover two sides of A4 paper. The protagonist dies young, of cancer, and the narrator attends his funeral. But the music slows, then collapses entirely, and Smith flips the script, in a way that recalls Arctic Monkeys’ A Certain Romance. Initially, it sounds perilously close to sneering at “little world” ambitions, as though there’s something unconscionable about wanting to own your own home and have kids. Tall Poppies retells the saga of a provincial David Watts figure – confident, handsome, a skilled footballer – who decides to stay put in his home town, become an estate agent and settle down.

Certainly, there are flashes of a smartness and depth to Smith’s writing that go beyond scabrous one-liners. The Overload is a starting point for a number of routes, rather than a perfectly formed end in itself. Yard Act are sporadically consumed by their own influences, particularly on Rich which, with its hypnotic two-note bassline, percussive clatter and distinctly Mark E Smith-ish vocal intonation – “skilled lay-BUUH in the private sec-TUUH” – sounds so much like the Fall circa Perverted By Language you start wondering if it’s actually a knowing double bluff, a wry comment on the media’s eagerness to bring up the Fall whenever a band with a vocalist who speaks rather than sings appears.Īt other points, however, the sense of a band not yet fully developed feels oddly exciting. It’s on-the-nose but it’s also incisive and funny – Dead Horse skewers the far-right’s notion of British culture as “knobheads Morris dancing to Sham 69”.įor all the expectation that surrounds The Overload, it’s sometimes clear that it’s the work of a band that’s barely been together two years. They specialise in waspish pen portraits: of ghastly alpha male businessmen (The Incident), defiant embezzlers (“I’m the victim here,” protests the protagonist of Quarantine the Sticks), middle-class foodies “growing your own lettuces in the potholes on the road”. So too, one suspects, has the fact that their lyrics bluntly confront post-Brexit Britain – “the age of the gentrified savage … the overload of discontent,” as the title track puts it. That it tends to resolve pleasingly into memorable choruses, during which frontman James Smith sometimes drops into a bruised, untutored croon, has clearly aided their speedy progress. Plus, every Society6 purchase pays an artist-empowering creativity around the world.Their default musical setting is skittery-but-muscular post-punk funk: punchy disco drums, stabbing guitar, the melodies driven by the bass. You can even take your aesthetic to your wardrobe with our array of apparel and bags. Find all the trending home decor styles like rustic, modern, patterns and more so you can make every room in your home from the bathroom to the bedroom to the kitchen feel uniquely you. Need more proof? We've got everything from minimalist wall art to beautiful original photography. Whether you're looking for art prints, tapestries, throw pillows, comforters, shower curtains, T Shirts or iPhone cases-we've truly got something for everyone. Everything is made to order-and with so many styles to choose from, Society6 makes it easy to match your exact taste. Choose your favorite and pair it with our best-in-class selection of wall art, home decor, bed and bath, apparel, tech accessories, furniture and lifestyle goods for your everyday. Society6 is home to a thriving community of independent artists worldwide, each with their own unique designs.

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