
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.