The pitch for Idles’ fifth album is very straightforward. “This is our album of beauty and power,” wrote frontman Joe Talbot on social media towards the end of last year. “All love songs.” Indeed, it’s so straightforward, you might question the value of announcing it at all: writing love songs is hardly a hitherto-unprecedented move in rock and pop history.
But context is everything, and this is Idles we’re taking about: authors of I’m Scum, Rottweiler, White Privilege and Never Fight a Man With a Perm, they of the guitarist given to performing onstage clad only in a pair of Y-fronts, who rose to fame on the back of debut album Brutalism, essentially a 41-minute long howl of grief and confusion at the death of Talbot’s mother and fury at the state of the UK. It was the right album for post-Brexit 2017, the year of Grenfell Tower, the Manchester Arena bombing, and of the Red Cross describing the state of Britain’s hospitals as a “humanitarian crisis” – so Idles did not seem like a band terribly likely to release an album of love songs, even one titled Tangk, in an onomatopoeic attempt to describe the impact of its sound.
