“We’re trying to avoid sounding like a conventional guitar band… Our goal has always been to expand what guitars can do”: Idles’ radical guitar duo dissect their “violent, dark tones” and explain why modeling is “wack”

IDLES's Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan [right].

Rising from the Bristol post-punk scene with 2017’s Brutalism, Idles momentarily seemed like route-one firebrands, taking on toxic masculinity, a crumbling NHS and the gamed class system over chippy beats and jawbreaker riffs. 

But if nobody expected the broadened horizons of 2021’s Crawler – a fourth album that saw frontman Joe Talbot stop rabble-rousing to actually sing, while the band pinballed between glam, soul and brooding electronica – then this year’s Tangk is an even bolder leap, putting acres of distance between Idles and their noisenik roots.