Idles’ fifth album starts with an arpeggiating piano and ends on a short, unshowy sax solo. One bouncing track, Dancer, is about the pleasure of bodies moving “cheek to cheek” and “hip to hip”; it features backing vocals by James Murphy and Nancy Whang from club-rock deities LCD Soundsystem. Another Tangk high point, the slow-burning Grace, imports the pensive synth reverberations of LCD’s track Someone Great.
Given that Idles’ pulverising first three LPs were fuelled by terse menace and guitar firepower, a major shift is clearly under way. This was a Bristol band who made their name taking down xenophobia and toxic masculinity with righteous, punk-adjacent aggro, one whose attention to musical detail always elevated them beyond the genre’s riffy indignation. Now they appear to be pupating into something else again: a rock band aiming for expansion even as they pursue more nuance.
