Scenes, I find, have their natural genres. In Ireland that currently means Fontaines DC style dingy rock, the ‘always there’ acoustic guitar stuff, and some nice inventive pop. It’s never really meant electro-rock.
That said, you can create scenes, or you can simply ride against them. When I first heard YARD, it was clear to me that they were going to have to do just that: they feel like an electro-guitar band destined to play raucous late-night clubs, and let’s face it, Ireland isn’t great at raucous late night clubs. Still, it’s really nice to hear something that’s genuinely different. It’s also inventive, well-produced, and in-your-face. Only right, then, to shine a little bit of a light on the Dublin lads as they release their self-titled debut EP. Oh, and those visualiser videos are beautiful.
Thankfully, in gutiarist Dan Malone, I found a man with plenty to say about what it’s all about…
First of all, can you tell me a bit about your backgrounds and where the band grew from?
The three of us have been friends for the better part of two decades. Myself and Emmet met through a mutual friend in secondary school when we were about 12. We then met George when we were about 15 I’d say. We were originally in a Dublin based band called The Dyatonics for a few years between 2012-2016. It was myself and George on guitar, Emmet on bass, Daniel Hoff (now of Gurriers) on vocals and Ethan Hegarthy on drums. We also had Bryan Gleeson and Brendan Bolger as drummers at different stages.
Emmet was in secondary school with Hoff and then later met Ethan in college. When Emmet moved to Australia for a year, that spelled the end for The Dyatonics. But myself and George wanted to continue writing music, so in 2017 we started a new project with Ben O’Neill (also now of Gurriers), who George met through college, as well as Daniel Hoff and, for a short period, George’s friend Steven Whearity on drums. When Emmet returned from Australia he also joined back in. Steven stopped coming to rehearsal at one stage or another and instead of finding a new drummer, we decided to play over programmed beats which gave birth to the electronic direction that the band would ultimately take.
Hoff was the one who originally came up with the band name ‘YARD’. We were very used to people getting our band name wrong in The Dyatonics (entirely our own fault) and so we wanted to have something that was very simple for this project. I believe the first meaning of the name YARD was in reference to one billion units of a currency i.e. a ‘yard’ of yen would be one billion yen. But we’ve since taken it to mean the unit of measurement and the space that it provides the listener.
Hoff was busy with another band called The Innocent Bystander which, at the time, was doing quite well and couldn’t commit enough time to YARD. So we ultimately parted ways, but YARD would later have their first show supporting The Innocent Bystander upstairs in Whelan’s. So the first iteration of YARD ended up being myself on guitar, Emmet on bass synth and vocals, Ben on guitar, synth and vocals and George on beats and synth. We spent the guts of 5 years, from 2018-2022, just writing music and figuring out what we wanted YARD to be.
We landed on a fusion of post-punk and electronica fairly early on, but it took us a long time to refine it into what it is now. We did have one headline show in Yamamori Tengu back in February 2020, right before the world collapsed. That’s actually when we started working with Cian Finlay on lighting and visuals who remains our lighting operator to this day. After that, we went back into hibernation and writing mode. I consider the first ‘official’ YARD show to be the secret show that we did with PANIKATAX in The Meadow back in June 2022, which is when the project started to make most sense in our heads.
We then got the opportunity to support Shame in The Button Factory in 2023 which snowballed into a number of different shows for YARD, not least of which was Ireland Music Week 2023. That show resulted in us getting a booking agent which, in turn, led to 44 live shows across 11 countries in 2024! Ben ultimately ended up leaving YARD in April 2024 to focus more on Gurriers which he and Hoff had been in since 2021. So the current iteration of YARD is myself, Emmet and George.
Your style fits neatly in with acts like Pendulum, The Prodigy and Death Grips, but of course those are just my best guesses. Where do you draw your inspiration from?
Yea you’ve definitely picked out some notable ones there, specifically The Prodigy and Death Grips. At the beginning when we were trying to figure out what we wanted YARD to be, the first band that we all collectively agreed on as a point of reference was SUUNS. We were just totally enamoured with their fusion of synths, guitars, drums and vocals and how it created this exceptionally large and distinct sound. So that was definitely one. But we were listening to lots of different stuff at the time: Gilla Band, Metz, Shame, Nicolas Jaar, Mogwai, Death In Vegas, Daft Punk and Boy Harsher. Lots of electronic music too from Daniel Avery, Paula Temple, Kelly Lee Owns and Chris Leibing.
There isn’t really a great deal in your stylistic realm in Ireland. Do you think that’s a positive or a negative when getting your music out there?
It has its pros and cons for sure. Whenever you have an act that’s creating music outside the status quo they usually have to work that extra bit harder to get early buy-in from listeners. I’ve found that to be true, not only in Ireland, but in the UK as well. Post-punk is still very much the flavour of the month and so, as an electropunk act, you’re fighting a bit of an uphill battle at times to get punters, radio DJs or magazines to take a chance on you. But the upside of that is that you’re very much in your own lane in terms of what you’re creating. We’re just trying to carve out our own path.
For example, I knew very early on that Ireland was not going to be the starting market for YARD. So it became my goal to get us into mainland Europe as soon as possible. With the help of our phenomenal booking agent Jule Konrad, we’ve seen a big interest in what YARD are doing from festivals and venues across the Netherlands, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Spain, Switzerland, and Slovakia. We’re adding festival appearances in Portugal, Italy and Belgium to the list this year too. The United States is a big one for us too, ever since our KEXP session went live in February this year. Our Irish listeners are now starting to catch up as a result. So I suppose the message is that you don’t always have to rely on breaking your home market first in order to set yourself up on the right path.
This is your debut EP. How did you decide what to put on it and how to bring it together?
We went about it in a somewhat non-conventional way. Trevor, Appetite (formerly known as Defacer), Slumber and Sunlight are some of the oldest tracks in the ‘modern’ YARD discography, dating back to early 2022 in some cases. If you’ve been following us for a while you’ll know that we released a single titled ‘ECDYSIS’ ft. Lauren Hannan (aka YINYANG) in 2023 followed by three singles Big Shoes, Bend and Call in 2024. We ended up taking the approach of releasing our newest music (i.e. Big Shoes, Bend and Call) first as singles in 2024 and then going back and recording the older tracks for this EP for 2025.
I suppose the rationale for that was twofold. Firstly, it took us a while to figure out what the new iteration of YARD would look, play and feel like after Ben left in April 2024. We all had extra responsibilities that would take us time to get comfortable with. Emmet was now singing on twice as many tracks as before, I was figuring out what the amalgamation of two sets of guitar lines would look like reduced down to one and George was combining synth parts and doing significantly more programming. So, we took our time and opted to perform the tracks live many times throughout 2024 which really helped us to arrive at their current sound on the EP.
Secondly, we didn’t want to rush into recording and releasing these tracks. I always envisaged these tracks being released as a cohesive piece of work, as they are on the EP, and so we wanted to have the time to give them the attention that they deserved. We only really got that time at the start of 2025, which is when we recorded the EP. But equally, we didn’t want to neglect releasing music entirely in 2024, so both ‘Bend’ and ‘Call’ were the two obvious and natural picks for single releases because they were written in the three piece format to begin with.
Talk to me about the link between the line ‘I am an appetite’ and its link to the single…
Yea, it’s one of those lyrics that came about unexpectedly, as many lyrics oftentimes do. For context, YARD previously had a track called Defacer which Ben sang on when he was in the band. When Ben left, he wanted to keep some of the lyrical content that was quite personal to his life which included Defacer. So, when we later went back to work on the track, Emmet had the task of rewriting the lyrics for the song. In the middle of the writing process, he saw Nosferatu in the cinema and there’s this line in the movie where Count Orlok describes himself as “an appetite”.
Emmet found it to be quite a powerful description and was able to relate, figuratively, to this vampiric force that’s in Ellen Hutter’s life which she cannot escape, drawing comparisons to the draining nature of negative internal dialogues. Count Orlok, much like the negative voice in our heads, is this insatiable creature that is destructive by its very nature. The song’s lyrics engage with internal dialogue like a dual conversation, not knowing who is speaking each line. Is it yourself trying to make sense of your experiences or is it that negative internal voice looking for every opportunity to cut you down
What about ‘Trevor’ – who is he and what are you telling us about him?
Trevor is a funny one, it’s by far the track that we get the most questions about in terms of lyrics. I suppose the repetitiveness of a man shouting about ‘Trevor’ and whether you’ve seen him after he was left in the rain can be quite unsettling to the listener. “Is Trevor a friend of the band’s?” “Is he ok?” “Did you ever find him?” But the reality is much less sincere.
Emmet has a habit of naming inanimate objects that have played a significant role in his life. In this case ‘Trevor’ was the name of a bike that he had for years, which was passed down to him by his brother. Sadly, one night, it was stolen outside of work. The loss of Trevor hit Emmet far harder than he had expected as it felt like he had lost a friend or a companion. So it’s definitely still a sad song, just not in the ways that people expect on first listen. But Trevor has really become a fan favourite and there’s even a cat named after Trevor in the UK!
Who (or maybe what) is bucketman, and how does he fit into your live show?
Bucketman was the first (and so far only) visual representation of the YARD project that we came up with. We were shooting a music video for an old YARD track called Kremlin back in 2018 in Ben’s living room in Palmerston and Alison Kenny was working on the video with us. The idea for the video was a single shot of a performance of the track in a dark room. But we wanted to have a strobe light in the centre of the room too. So Ben grabbed this old white bucket from the kitchen, taped ‘YARD’ onto the front of it and put a strobe light underneath the bucket on a stool.
After the shoot was done, we were messing around taking some photos and thought it would be funny to take some photos with the YARD bucket on our heads. So we each took turns with the bucket and it was decided that I looked the weirdest with it on because I’m quite gangly, which gave a creepy vibe to the whole look. So ‘Bucketman’ was born and became the face of the band in promotional posts and music videos which was great for us because we felt like traditional press photos didn’t suit what we were doing back then. Plus, we always saw Bucketman as this outlier who’s off doing his own thing which, in many ways, was (and is) reflective of how we view YARD.
Nowadays, Bucketman doesn’t feature in our live show too much, other than some visuals of the YARD bucket itself – but maybe we’ll bring him back in the future.
I haven’t had the chance to catch a gig yet. Do you go for a particular feel or aesthetic live?
YARD has been and always will be a ‘live-first’ act. Our live show is everything to us and we’ve put a lot of work into it over the years in order to deliver unique and sensory experiences to the audience. We’re all about escapism. We want our shows to be a place where you can come and get totally immersed in our world for an hour or so and forget about everything else that you have going on outside of the four walls of the venue. But to do that, you need to have a captivating, unique and memorable show to begin with.
In that regard, we’re extremely fortunate to work with James Eager and Cian Finlay who handle our live sound and lighting respectively. There’s three of us on the stage, but it’s very much a five man show when they’re around. What James and Cian bring to our live show is what allows us to offer the audience the level of escapism that we’re aiming for. But even when Cian and James aren’t around, we’ve designed our live show in such a way that we can still provide a consistent experience, that’s on par with what our fans have come to expect from a YARD show, irrespective of whether we’re in a 50 cap venue in Liverpool or a 3,000 cap hall in Rennes.
This is just the first EP. What are the long term plans for YARD?
Export the live show to as many new markets as possible and release as much new music as we can – that’s the plan!
