First things first. If you’re not yet familiar with Yakkie they are a two-years-young supergroup of sorts with members from notable UK DIY bands including Personal Best, Colour Me Wednesday, and the original Dream Nails. That’s the contractual-obligation description but it doesn’t tell you as much about the band as you might think. In a scene where people are regularly in and out of each other’s groups, what meaning does supergroup have, you ask? All will be revealed after immersing yourself in this skilful, assured, thoughtfully-righteous, exhilaratingly-entertaining alt-rock debut. For while those aforementioned bands had multidimensional appeal, it’s possible to envisage a group fusing Personal Best’s pop prowess, the Wednesdays’ ethics, and the stellar talents of the Nails’ key asset Janey Starling, while remaining completely unprepared for the sheer aural power of the Yakkie experience: a sound that the cognoscenti are already calling “riot metal”, and if that’s not a Bandcamp option yet it’s surely only a matter of time.
Produced at the same studio where The Skints recorded their ‘FM’ album, this is an LP that sounds like a lot of fun was had in the making: packed full of tunes, incredible musicianship, and a blend of ‘growers’ and immediate earworms. ‘Kill The Cop Inside Your Head’ kicks off with its title song and single, a riff-based backing track counterpointed by Janey’s compelling Hanna-esque delivery (“arm the dreamers; tear apart the seams!”), seemingly invoking Krista Tippett and her framing of hope not as wishful thinking but as resilience, praxis, muscle memory – alongside a warning about internalisation of social control mechanisms/technologies.
‘He Sleeps Alone’ was rightly another single, in their own words “an anti-fuckboy anthem written in the age of the situationship” and a brilliant takedown of toxic masculinity in general (“he’ll buy the perfect wife.. and her softness will sicken him”), with commanding vocals over a grunge soundtrack, gilded with wonderfully dub-inflected production.
‘Lean Out’ is next and another hard-hitting riff-based communiqué; since the album’s themes elsewhere reference male thinkers like Augusto Boal and John Edgar Wideman I don’t feel too bad that this track’s skewering of corporate-feminism and its historic compromise with the reproduction of labour recalls for me a passage from Engels’ much-debated ‘Origin Of The Family..’ where he rues that “every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the frustration and misery of others.” (You don’t get this sort of analysis in Mojo, you know.)
I have no idea if this album represents simply the first ten Yakkie songs ready to release into the wild, or a deliberate curation to display the breadth of their range, but it could easily be the latter given a song like ‘Atlas’, placed roughly in the middle of the record, its first two minutes a stripped back contrast to second single ‘Rabbit’s Got The Gun’, which follows it in a further explosion of relentless riffage. ‘Secrets’ is another paradigm shift, the power of the track in its epic concoction of layered guitars, intriguing lyrics (“you would have to cut out my tongue..”) and Janey’s soulfully soaring vocals. Meanwhile on ‘Criticise Me’ and ‘Take It All’ the band’s punk roots are showing, the latter a fantastic put down/triumph-over-adversity anthem: “looks like you got away, but your time will come one day!”
‘Right Of Reply’ is a song addressing gender-based violence that Janey probably needed to write and that probably needed to be written by Janey: “control your jealousy, not me! your insecurity, not me!” while final track, the stunning ‘Under The Pavement Is The Beach’ borrows a Paris ’68 graffito as metaphor for optimism-of-the-will in the face of dangers both interpersonal and geopolitical:
“let’s meet in the streets and we’ll scream, we’ll scream; lets meet in the fields and we’ll plant some seeds.”
No spoilers (this record can’t be spoiled) but so many things to listen out for: Maeve’s muscular tempo shifts and drum rolls on ‘Right Of Reply’, ‘Lean Out’, ‘Take It All’; Laura’s menacing breakdown bass on ‘Rabbit’s Got The Gun’; the moment where Robin’s oxyacetylene guitar pedal kicks in on ‘Right Of Reply’, and those always-too-short solos; the wall-of-sound crescendos of ‘Secrets’ and ‘Under The Pavement..’; the group’s irresistible gang backing vocals, especially on ‘Take It All’, ‘He Sleeps Alone’, ‘Secrets’ and ‘Under The Pavement..’ which coincidentally or not are my favourites on the record.
Early punk had many virtues, but one thing most groups avoided (female-led included) was direct big-P politics. 80s/90s DIY yielded some fiercely intelligent oppositional voices but I’m not sure we ever had an activist/communicator/bandleader like Janey before, at least not this side of the Atlantic. Punk bequeathed riot grrrl, indiepop, the ‘post-‘ genres: groups that rarely rocked – in fact often opposed it, for all kinds of reasons. So why do we still use ‘rock’ as a compliment? Because the problem was never really with the form, but its (lack of) content: most musicians have virtually nothing to say. At the other extreme a genre like anarcho-punk was all content and no form: most consciously political music does not swing; it neither rocks nor rolls. In resolving these failings dialectically, a band like Yakkie (likewise their soulmates Petrol Girls) goes some way to making much of our past music culture redundant. This is a Rock record, often in an overtly 90s-influenced style, and this is a Political record. Three decades ago, the US had Bikini Kill and Rage Against The Machine; if it’s taken British culture this long to respond by synthesising the appeal of both, well it’s better late than never.
So this is something (nearly) new. Listening to this album I’m reminded of the feeling I had once while watching Petrol Girls play a coruscating show at DIY Space [the 2nd LOUD WOMEN Fest, I believe – ed], standing shocked and awed somewhere respectfully ‘boys to the back’ – and of the first time I played on a line-up with Janey’s first band and saw her claim the stage with a MC technique I’ll précis as: “This song is about x!”… “This song is about y!” But it’s more visceral than that as I can’t currently listen to ‘Under The Pavement..’ in particular without an emotional reaction. This is something that feels nearly new and it nearly goes without saying that such a combination of music and message is vital, in fact extremely necessary, right now. At its peak moments, the Yakkie debut not only rehabilitates rock; its best songs may be among the greatest released in this country in the last 30 to 50 years. This could be a mere sketch for ten more albums to come or Yakkie could disappear tomorrow, but right now it doesn’t matter. This is a perfect debut, a mic dropped, a gauntlet thrown, a shot in the arm. You should buy it.
‘Kill The Cop Inside Your Head’ is released 13 February.
Catch Yakkie on the LOUD WOMEN Stage at Rebellion Festival this August
