At a time when every skate video so proudly wears the sum of its influences, it can be hard to put why something feels different into words.
Yardsale’s first project, The YS Video, came out over five years ago, and in the time since — through sizable roster shifts and all — the brand has managed to keep and evolve a singular ~feel~. Yes, the inspirations are out on the sleeve, but it exists at this unlikely crossroad of a smooth, dreamlike neon haze, and sophisticatedly chaotic skateboarding: teamriders with very distinct arms, a trademark jittery HD lensmanship not often seen in our era of “roll-up face,” and so many spots where the landing is a dice-roll through cobblestones, dirt and whatever else.
If it was just some euphoric B-roll over some smooth-ass, by-the-book EuroTech™ skating, it’s hard to imagine it’d hit quite the same — let alone carry such a distinct fingerprint.
YS3 is their best yet, featuring an incredible skateboarding from newly minted pros Alex Hatfield (with what’s probably the best first trick in a video since Cyrus’ Paymaster opener) and Bear Myles, plus appearances from Kelvinas Litvinas, Curtis Pearl, Stanley Pradel, and new addition after the Enjoi exodus, Thaynan Costa.
Trying to put it into words might only get us halfway there (that’s the entire difficulty of writing about skateboarding and skate videos), but then I remembered Jacob Harris, another prolific U.K. lensman, summed it up perfectly back in 2019: “Dan [Kreitem] will probably hate me saying this, but I love the music in Yardsale videos. They feel like kids inhabiting almost the same benzo-infused and absurd landscape, wherever they are. It’s this feeling that videos can give: a kind of aesthetic-ized dream that you know deep down isn’t true, but might be much better to live in than trying to participate in the world. There’s such a feeling of escapism and youth to those videos, and that feeling is what I think a lot of us skateboard to feel.”