Dan Malone of YARD told David Hennessy about their debut EP, combining post punk with techno and playing festivals across Europe.
Dublin-based electropunk trio YARD released the anticipated self-titled debut EP recently.
YARD, made up of Emmet White, Dan Malone and George Ryan, have been compared to acts such as The Prodigy, Death Grips, Orbital and Underworld.
The EP comes after a breakout 2024 and a storming 2025 so far.
The Dublin band fuse the post-punk intensity of bands such as The Fontaines DC, who they have shared the stage with, and Gurriers, which includes two former YARD members, with the pulsating techno that makes them unique and has seen them grow a following particularly live as they are currently playing festivals all over Europe.
The Irish World caught up with guitarist Dan Malone to chat about the debut EP.
How did you three lads come together?
“Myself and Emmet have been mates for the better part of two decades.
“Emmet was in school with Daniel Hoff who is singer of Gurriers.
“Myself, Emmett and Dan played in a Dublin- based band back when we were teenagers and in our early 20s called The Dyatonics.
“When we were starting that band, we were looking for another guitarist.
“Dan Hoff knew George.
“Funny enough actually we did one of the Workman’s Club’s Bank Holiday shows back in the day and I believe it was the night that Trevor Dietz picked up The Fontaines, as they were called back then.
“We co-billed it with them.
“I remember that show and there was absolutely nobody there for The Fontaines’ set which is crazy to think about.
“Emmet went to Australia for a year and that kind of put the axe in that project but myself and George really wanted to continue writing music so we started a new project which would eventually turn into YARD with a guy called Ben O’Neill.
“Ben is also one of the guitarists in Gurriers now as well.
“So myself, George and Ben started that project.
“We got Dan Hoff in again and then we had a guy who was doing drums for the band originally.
“Then when Emmet came back from Australia, he joined in so we had this big six piece band at one stage.
“The drummer stopped coming to practice.
“Instead of finding another drummer, we were like, ‘Right, we’ll try something else for a bit’.
“We just said, ‘Right, we’ll play over some programmed beats for the time being’ and for the time being turned into forever.
“I suppose that kind of sent us down the electronic path.
“Dan Hoff was in another band so he ended up leaving the project which effectively left myself, Emmet, George and Ben.
“That was the main first iteration of YARD.
“We operated as a four piece for the better part of five years but we weren’t gigging at the start.
“We were totally just doing this for the craic, just writing weird, noisy electronic music trying to figure out what the project even was.
“We were rehearsing in one of the lad’s sitting rooms in Palmerstown with headphones on after work and stuff like that.
“And we ended up doing this secret rave in June 2022.
“We did a one hour set and there was loads of people there and that was kind of when the project started making the most sense in our heads of what it could be live.
“We ended up supporting Shame in The Button Factory at the start of 2023.
“That snowballed into a lot of opportunities, doing some support slots with Scaler, who are a Bristol-based band and then we ended up doing Ireland Music Week.
“From that show, we ended up getting a booking agent and then from that booking agent, we did 44 live shows across 11 countries last year.
“So we went from playing secret rave shows and practicing in the lads’ living rooms to doing showcase slots in Slovakia and all these mad countries.
“That was great.
“Ben actually did leave the band in April 2024 just before it kicked off.
“That was just because he was in YARD and Gurriers at the same time and Gurriers was also kicking off so he wanted to focus more on that project.
“That’s why we’re the three piece version now that we are today.”
That certainly is a big progression over a short time. Has it been a whirlwind over the last year or so?
“We were really quite fortunate to have our booking agent come on and work with us but her feedback to us has been that anytime she brings a festival booker to our shows, we have one of the highest book rates just because the music is very accessible.
“It’s obviously quite noisy and there’s shouting and loud guitars and stuff but the live show itself, what we’ve found is that there’s something there for everyone.
“If you’re not into the vocals, you might like the beats and the rhythms and stuff like that.
“(Or) you might like the guitars and the vocals.
“There’s a wide audience there that’s interested and I think that’s what’s led to all of these shows.
“But compared to the amount of shows that we had before last year, it’s definitely been a significant ramp up for sure.”
How would you describe your sound?
“It’s a weird one because we didn’t even know for a long time what we were.
“People would ask us, ‘What genre is this?’
“And we were just like, ‘I don’t know’.
“And I think that that’s always been what I’ve liked about YARD.
“We never felt really restricted or boxed into any kind of given genre.
“We called it electronic noise rock for a while but that didn’t really fit.
“But now we kind of describe it as electro punk.
“It’s kind of the best description that we’ve kind of come up with.
“We didn’t really have a goal post in terms of, ‘we want to sound like these’ but the vision was always, ‘Let’s take everything we love about electronic music in terms of techno and synths and combine it with what everyone’s loving in the post punk scene now in terms of the vocals and the guitars and just fuse those worlds together.”
Were the Prodigy an inspiration?
“Yeah, absolutely.
“The Prodigy is a very accessible act. It doesn’t really matter if you’ve seen them before, heard of them before: If you go to a Prodigy gig, you’re more than likely going to have a good time.
“And that’s kind of what we try to do with our music.
“We don’t want to shut anyone out.
“The goal for us is for people to just stumble into the tent that we’re playing in having never heard any music before of ours and walk away saying, ‘That was one of the gigs of the weekend’.
“Not everyone is into the (post punk) shouty vocals, guitars and drums but as soon as you put a dance beat or a techno beat behind it, all of a sudden it probably becomes a bit more palatable.
“That’s kind of what we’re finding as well.”
The EP, which was just released, shows who you are as a band right now, isn’t that right?
“Yeah, for sure.
“It’s weird because we took the approach that the songs that are on the EP are some of the oldest songs that we have in terms of existing in our set list and even just writing.
“I mean some of them go back as far as early 2022.
“Last year we released three singles: Big Shoes, Bend and Call.
“And interesting enough, those tracks are actually our newest songs.
“So last year, we took the approach of releasing our newest music first as singles and then going back and recording the oldest stuff for an EP.
“I suppose the rationale for that was kind of twofold.
“Number one, obviously we moved from a four piece to a three piece last year so that took some time to kind of figure out new responsibilities and how to manage that.
“So we didn’t want to rush into recording the core tunes when we were still figuring out how they worked in this new three piece format.
“And we ended up writing tunes as a three piece last year which were Bend and Call.
“And we said, ‘Look, these songs have been written as a three piece anyway so let’s just release them as singles to keep us ticking over’, which we did and that worked out well for us.
“And then at the start of this year, we finally got the time to sit down and record the EP.
“It’s been great to have them out because they appeared in every show more or less last year and obviously people would be coming up at the end of the show being like, ‘Can I listen to the tunes?’
“’Oh no, not yet. Yeah, we will have them online eventually’.
“And so it’s good to have them out there.”
The EP kicks off with Trevor, a track I get a dark feeling from. What inspired that? Who is the Trevor that is being searched for in the lyrics?
“Trevor’s a gas one because it’s definitely the song that we get the most questions about after shows.
“I think it’s just the repetition and the lyrics of this man shouting into a mic asking about Trevor and whether you’ve seen him because he was left in the rain, it sounds quite sincere and you get this sense of worry for this person.
“But the reality, I suppose, is a lot less sincere.
“Emmet just has this habit of naming objects that are important to him in his life.
“A few years ago, he was riding this bike to work.
“The bike was called Trevor and one night he was in work, Trevor was locked outside in the rain and he came outside to discover that Trevor had been stolen.
“So the lyrics are about Emmet losing his bike.
“But without fail, every gig someone will ask about Trevor.”
The closing track Sunlight refers to ‘a lost cause’..
“That track is probably one of the darker tracks on the EP.
“The lyrics were written in reference to COVID.
“It was deep lockdown when everyone was kind of stuck in doors.
“One of the ways that myself and many people passed the time is we were just online gaming, having the craic playing Call of Duty: Warzone and stuff like that.
“And there was one night where myself, Emmet and our friend were just up playing.
“We started playing at maybe 11pm or something and ended up playing until five or six in the morning, just drinking beers, having craic and Sunlight is kind of about this.
“First of all, it’s about Emmet’s realisation that he turned around at one stage and it was 6am and he’d been staying up all night.
“But it was a reflection on how time just was very blurry during that period, hours and days kind of just passed by and kind of amalgamated into one.
“And when you’re in that state of blurriness, there’s no real significance to every day, you kind of feel like this lost cause.
“You kind of feel helpless.
“I suppose it’s light hearted in the sense that it’s joking about staying up ‘til 6am gaming with your friends.
“But it’s dark in the sense that it kind of reflects on the realities of lockdown and not being able to see people and the mindsets that you can kind of get into.”
Another track Appetite was directly inspired by the film Nosferatu, isn’t that right?
“Yeah in the middle of the writing process, Emmet had gone to the cinema to see Nosferatu and there’s this line in the movie where Count Orlok is like, ‘I am an appetite’.
“He describes himself as an appetite and Emmet just was very taken aback by that description because it’s quite a striking description of oneself, just how Count Orlok was this presence and this insatiable hunger that was kind of feeding on Ellen Hutter’s life in the movie.
“He kind of drew comparisons between this literal vampiric force that was attached to the protagonist in the movie and the negative internal dialogues in your head and how they can literally suck the life out of you.”
What’s next? Are there plans for more music you’re already working on?
“Yeah, absolutely.
“One of our main priorities is to just gig as much as possible because we are a live first act.
“Live is absolutely where Yard is best consumed and where it was intended to be consumed.
“We’re actually still trying to figure out how to best convey the live show on record.
“We’re going to be gigging as much as possible.
“And in terms of new music, we’re working on lots of new tracks.
“I think one thing that’s always been great about Yard is that we’ve always tried to carve out our own path in terms of how we do things.”
What has been a live highlight of what you have done so far?
“In June last year, a good friend of mine passed away in a motorcycle accident and I was just in an absolute terrible headspace for a couple of weeks.
“We had a gig scheduled first week of July in Switzerland.
“I was in two minds about whether I was even up for doing the gig.
“I said to Emmet, ‘Look, I don’t know if I’m going to do it’.
“And he said, ‘Right, that’s fine’.
“And I was kind of like, ‘Oh, you know what? My mate wouldn’t want me to be sitting at home just feeling sorry for myself’.
“He would want me to go and do the show.
“I went and did the show and it ended up being one of the best shows of the year.
“That’s a show that could have very easily not happened.
“It was a very big stage, huge crowd, and it was a great time.
“That’s an example, I suppose, of how good shows can kind of come out of nowhere.
“There was one show in particular, again last year, that we were looking forward to for the whole year. There’s a new music showcase festival in Rennes called the Trans Musicales.
“We got booked at the start of 2024 and it was literally the last show of 2024 so we were looking forward to it for the whole year.
“It was just an amazing day.
“The great thing about Trans Musicales is that it’s just on a scale like no other.
“Every stage is a three or four thousand cap airport hangar and it’s just absolutely rammed for every gig.
“It doesn’t matter who you are, people just go there to find new music.
“We were playing this airport hangar at one in the morning: There was three and a half thousand people there.
“It was great craic.
“So there’s two examples of one show that you don’t expect to be good and ends up being great and then another show that you do expect to be good and actually does end up being good which is actually the rarity because it’s normally the ones that you think are going to be good that end up being shite.”
You’ve mentioned Gurriers a couple of times, sharing some members etc. They’ve really taken off, haven’t they?
“Yeah, absolutely.
“It’s great to see Gurriers doing well.
“There’s just so many interconnections between us and them.
“It’s absolutely fantastic when there’s just so many Irish bands doing well.”
You also mentioned The Fontaines DC and they’ve really blown up but you said they were not big when you shared the stage with them..
“It was crazy.
“I think it ended up that we actually had a bigger crowd than them.
“I just remember the room being maybe a quarter full in the Workman’s main room for that show.
“It’s just crazy to think that if you compare that to then looking at their main stage show of Primavera last weekend where you had 10s of 1000s of people clamouring to see them, I think there’s a really powerful message there for bands.
“No matter how small things may start, you really never know in music where you’re going to end up going.
“It’s just one of those industries where it can break your heart or it can do some really, really great stuff for ya which makes it exciting.
“It’s honestly great to have so many Irish bands doing well.”
YARD’s self titled debut EP is out now.
YARD play ArcTanGent Festival, Bristol on 14 August and Maui Festival, Norfolk on 23 August.
