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.
And yet, here we are: songs unironically titled Gratitude and Grace, equally unironic paeans to the joys of parenthood, new romance, freudenfreude – taking delight in other people’s success – and strong fraternal relationships, the latter winningly compared to the sound of “Hall & Oates … playing in my heart”. Grace and A Gospel are both songs to which the adjective “beautiful” could be unexpectedly appended: the former has a gorgeous melody, delivered by Talbot in a bruised croon, the latter features an insistent piano figure, softly-sung vocals and samples of strings both pizzicato and sweeping. “Joy on joy, cheerleader, happy boy,” sings Talbot, on Pop Pop Pop, words which once seemed no more likely to come out of his mouth – at least without a hefty dose of sarcasm – than the lyrics of Rule Britannia.
In truth, there was always a sentimental streak to them – Brutalism’s followup was Joy As An Act of Resistance – but a transformation began in the wake of 2020’s chart-topping Ultra Mono. That was an album which seemed to push Idles’ initial approach as far as it could go: everything cranked up to 11, the desire to create a sense of cathartic communal rage tipping over into broad-brushstrokes rabble-rousing (after much online controversy, the band no longer perform its single Model Village, deeming its depiction of small-town life a little sweeping and condescending). Top of the charts or not, it sounded like a band about to self-immolate or slip into self-parody. Instead, they eased off the throttle on 2021’s Crawler, a dense, introspective splurge of musical ideas that ranged from soul to ambient electronics.
Tangk, however, is a stronger album than its predecessor, succeeding in an even more radical shift of mood – Crawler centred on self-lacerating depictions of Talbot’s struggles with addiction – without negating Idles’ raw power. It’s full of smart, intriguing ideas: Roy’s rackety, clattering take on a soul ballad; the eerie buzzes and feedback drones that course through Pop Pop Pop; the LCD Soundsystem-assisted Dancer’s confoundingly lithe-yet-heavy take on post-punk funk; the faint echo of Julee Cruise’s atmospheric 1990 hit Falling that haunts the closing Monolith.
Enough smart and intriguing ideas, in fact, that the least effective tracks are the ones that feel closest to Idles’ old sound. The sentiment behind Hall & Oates is delightful, but the garage-rock backing is rote and the lyrics too on-the-nose: “Word to your mother: I really, really love my brother.” Talbot is better at unexpectedly stirring a pro-republican sentiment into Gift Horse, a song ostensibly about his daughter – “Fuck the king! She’s the king” – or capturing the seconds before that a potential romance becomes real on Dancer: “Brush hands … my breath moves your hair … I can taste the mood in my mouth.”
It really shouldn’t be a surprise that a band who proved themselves good at one thing turn out to be good at other things as well. But Tangk does feel like a surprising album, which perhaps says something about the way one’s expectations have been narrowed in a music world increasingly dominated by tightly curated stay-in-your-lane playlists and algorithms programmed to second-guess your tastes by serving you up more of the same. Or perhaps it says something about underestimating Idles themselves, who in fairness, always seemed as likely to collapse under the weight of the contradictions at their centre as to develop; making muscular, aggressive music about “impotent male rage”, as Talbot put it, is a tough balancing act, liable to tip over, open to misinterpretation. Not everything on Tangk works, but the vast majority of it does, with an urgency that draws you into its message of positivity: reason enough to break out the freudenfreude.
This week Alexis listened to
Beth Gibbons – Floating On a Moment
News of a solo album from Portishead’s vocalist is unexpected – it’s 11 years since she announced it! – but welcome, particularly in light of Floating On a Moment’s shivering beauty.
