Yard Act: Victoria Warehouse, Manchester – Live Review

Yard Act | Silver Gore
O2 Victoria Warehouse, Manchester
13th November 2026

The Leeds four-piece picked off the scabs of 21st-century existentialism to reveal some oozing warmth on Friday the 13th, turning a frozen Trafford night into a sixteen-song meditation on doubt, memory and the mule-stubborn comfort of a good chorus. Thomas Sidwell was there, inappropriately dressed and cold.

A trek out to Pomona on a bitter Friday night, winter sweeping in and freezing the city solid, the cold coming off the Ship Canal – time to dig out your best trench coat. It was Friday the 13th, but no spooky goings-on here, just some agitated Yorkshire poets preaching from the dark accompanied by some irresistibly funky disco-punk basslines.

Silver Gore brought a joyous warm-up counterpoint to the cynicism of the main act. Theirs is joyful, synth-led pop, held together by a metronomic drummer and fronted by a singer bouncing around the stage with the kind of fun that is strangely absent from so much of the scene. The outfits were magnificent. A possessed, horned horse-or-zebra head in a fabulous wig loomed over the drummer, who sat beneath a fluffy pink hat with ears and pom-poms, while the guitarist wore a pair of layered birthday-cake chaps that deserve their own review. Zeroes, with its beautiful glockenspiel and flowing, arpeggiated synth lines, caught the zeitgeist of the whole set: smooth, optimistic and defiantly bright.

Then came Yard Act, a band who opened their new album by announcing they had “absolutely nothing new to say”, and who have spent the months since proving, with a grin, that they didn’t mean it. Their third album, You’re Gonna Need a Little Music, is a record about self-doubt wearing the clothes of self-belief, and live it makes a great deal more sense than it does on paper. Empty Pledges rumbled into life first, James Smith’s impostor-syndrome sermon landing with a preacher’s fury. Human Sacrifice, a fan favourite that began life as a B-side, rattled back to the angular, art-punk clatter of their earliest days. Next came Cherophobe Rock, named for the literal fear of happiness, yet ironically climaxing in a face-melting saxophone solo that made everyone in the crowd very happy. Between tracks, Smith gives a nod to the Friday the 13th date, which inevitably draws pantomime ‘woooos’ from the floor. He swiftly shuts down the spooky theatrics, deadpanning that he didn’t believe in superstition – only in “hard work and graft.”

Dead Horse got the crowd bouncing, Smith’s delivery dizzyingly impressive, before a dissonant sax solo brought the whole thing to a tumbling end. They were rattling through songs at speed by then, so quickly you felt you’d barely blinked. ‘Thrill of the Chase’ tore past, and Payday followed, a satire of gentrification in which growing your own vegetables, once a matter of survival, has become a middle-class lifestyle accessory while the roads outside crumble. The room bellowed the refrain back: take the money and run.

Janey Said is named for the alter ego Smith invented to personify the part of his brain that never stops thinking, the voice that insists he should be dreaming bigger. Then came New Beginnings, the highlight of the new album and a triumphant, feel-good song, and Smith clearly knew it, cockerel-strutting across a raised platform at the front of the stage. It’s a great tune and the high-water mark of the record. We Make Hits! kept the momentum going, a funky, writhing tune with a brilliant hard breakdown and lyrics as sharp as ever.

And then, tucked into the middle of all that noise, came the night’s strangest, most tender moment. Down by the Stream is set in Partington, just down the road, where a group of teenage boys skip a birthday party to smoke cannabis by a woodland stream and flee when a lad is shot in the leg with an airgun pellet. It slides from nostalgia into confessional, as Smith admits to bullying Jono, a boy who was deaf and spoke with a stutter, out of his own insecurity. The room, thick with the memory of what we all did and regret when we were young, went quiet in reflection. It is a song about how the past is never quite as we left it, and there is a lovely coda: Smith has said that the lads from that song have been at the last few Manchester shows, that they’re all friends again, and that Jono barely remembered it happening at all. Memory, it turns out, is kinder to the bullied than the bully.

Dark Days and The Overload brought the floor back to its feet, and You’re Gonna Need a Little Music, with a touch of Roxy Music about it, drew perhaps the best reception of the night, the whole room bounding in time and singing every word.

But the heart of it was 100% Endurance. Closing the 2022 debut, it embraces the pointlessness of life as something peaceful and humbling, an optimistic, grounded summation of existentialism that sets mortal anxiety against the quiet resilience of the human spirit. It is bloody brilliant, and you should listen to it right now. Go on. Mid-song, the ovation swelled so loudly that it threatened to silence the most verbose man in Leeds. “For once I’m lost for words,” Smith said, and for once it was true, before diving back in and carrying us home on the chorus.

The Trench Coat Museum and Over the Barrel, the latter’s brass-band swagger bigger and braver live, closed the main set, and Dream Job sent us back into the cold for an encore that felt like a benediction.

Outside, the freeze had deepened. But a band who spent their first two albums picking at the scabs of late capitalism had spent a Friday night proving that there is still plenty to talk about, and that you can say it while dancing. Smith has promised they’ll keep going for as long as it’s fun, because, ironically, they still have something to say. I don’t think anybody in the room doubted it.

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Words by Thomas Sidwell; more work on his author profile hereand Instagramhere

Photos – credit to Phe Jones