Ironic how the band whose debut was called Brutalism are more brutalist now than ever, eh? That’s not ‘brutal’, by the way; we’re in the realms of architecture, not the heavy music writer’s bag of go-to descriptors. It’s the feel that IDLES’ music gives off now, crafted from exposed concrete with all hard, austere angles and the looming magnitude of the industrial landscape.
Go back a few years, though, and that isn’t IDLES at all. 2018’s Joy As An Act Of Resistance remains their peak, an album stuffed with swinging punk bruisers that could still wear its compassion and dedication to betterment prominently. But maybe reducing IDLES to that isn’t productive. Ultra Mono in 2020 could stand as evidence for that, in which the chants and slogans began to outweigh the central points, and the whole thing began to creak. As the band who sat as figureheads of the most lucrative post-punk movement the UK has seen in…well, possibly ever, no one was ready to deal with failure from them. And let’s be clear—that album wasn’t a failure, but the fact Crawler followed just the next year showed how desperate for reinvention they were. Time really has been kind to that album, especially as the note with which IDLES left on for their longest gap between releases yet. It felt darker and heavier, and clearly coloured by the horrendous car accident in which frontman Joe Talbot was involved. The biggest difference, though, was that it was IDLES’ first album where instant gratification wasn’t even a humoured factor.
It does need to be said that Crawler isn’t their best album, and neither is TANGK. This very much picks up on the atmosphere where its predecessor left off, with IDLES committing to a similarly cold, lurching, unfriendly sound, which doesn’t naturally connect as rabble-rousing brusqueness is intended. But that also feeds into the strange dichotomy running rampant across this album, as IDLES try to celebrate joy and gratitude from within the gestalt industrialism. Hell, the title itself is a corruption of the word ‘tank’ with the ‘g’ for added harshness, in what might as well be reshaped into a sledgehammer cracking down on a block of concrete or steel. It’s certainly a difficult album to parse, and one that might not sit well for those used to what came before. It might be IDLES’ most consistently fascinating album, though, and depending on the lens, that can feel like the bigger achievement.
It should be noted straight away that, in terms of direction, TANGK is a wholehearted continuation of Crawler. Most of the raucous hooks and clattering tempos remain stripped away, in favour of hulking masses dominated by bass and percussion, and straining to keep themselves contained. Opener IDEA 01 doesn’t even have any guitar on it; just the maddening twinkling of close pianos and fizzing, airy percussion, and Talbot singing with all of his wonky imperfections on show. It is strange, and though not unprecedented, it can be difficult to acclimatise to. After all, Dancer or Hall & Oates are ostensibly business as usual as they return to rippling post-punk muscle, reversing the supposed atrophy and sounding like ‘regular’ IDLES again.
But that’s kind of the problem—the ideal of ‘regular’ isn’t something that IDLES are keen to entertain. TANGK doesn’t want to be ‘regular’; it wants to actively subvert and deconstruct almost every foundation this band have previously laid. Admittedly, that can be a hard sell, even if you’re into it. They’re ideas brimming with merit, but you’re left uncertain of how far they be cast out, or what exactly can come from them. Take Jungle, for instance, which can feel like a slightly lesser permutation when its revving guitar can lack much of the weight that its occasionally more sonorous breaks want to instill. At the same time, though, it’s hard to look away, and even harder to predict just what IDLES will do next. TANGK can enrapture as much as perplex and alienate, and that alone has to be worth something, right?
Well, to put it most fairly, the extent to which it does vastly surpasses that which it doesn’t. TANGK is an album that demands attention, maximalist but haunted and reverberant at the same time. Just look at the droning synth and percussion clatters of POP POP POP, or the twanging bass that fences the percussion and synth shudders of Roy. On TANGK, IDLES are craving instability, and they seem to be achieving exactly what they want with that. They’re undoubtedly gripping, as they traipse through the barren concrete jungle of their own creation, hammering and blowing out caverns of solace with which to plant the vaguest hints of humanity. The fact is largely as shrunken in presence as he is just seems to settle that—more than even, IDLES are the landscape, not the people living within.
It can be an almost alien concept, particularly in such stark contrast to what they were. That hasn’t been scrubbed, though; moments of abject quotability and Talbot’s stentorian declarations do remain in smaller doses. Gift Horse gives the first indication with a line like “Fuck the king! He ain’t the king, she’s the king!”, upon which Dancer builds on the album’s bar-none poppiest moment, complete with huge pop chorus flanked by backing vocals from LCD Soundsystem of all people. Though, these are definitely exceptions rather than the rule. TANGK largely seeks to sever ties like that, with success in its mission being a largely subjective concept. Though it’s not like IDLES are shy about diving headlong into it, or that those aforementioned examples are strictly ‘throwbacks’ as much as repurposed assets.
But if the thesis of TANGK is to complete the tearing down of the veneer of IDLES that Crawler began, surely that seems about right, no? After all, deconstruction still needs to have something at its centre, a lot of the time being the remainder of what was deconstructed. In the case of IDLES, the blustering, bloviating camaraderie of old is here mostly in spirit now, largely inhabiting a scene that seems all too hostile to have it there. Small touches like the grazing strings of A Gospel or the penetrating synth tone haranguing Gratitude construct the harshness, but building something light within that is very much IDLES’ forte. It’s rarely as obvious but it’s distinctly human all the same, as Talbot’s fist-in-the-air bravado is often pared all the way back, and deflated all the way down. It’s bold, certainly, and the payoff can be inconsistent, though never to where it’s misguided. There’s a sweet spot hit, almost to the point of uncanniness, where IDLES can believably make something like this work for themselves. And besides, there’s always Hall & Oates to fall back on if all else fails, a scratched-and-scuffed hardcore punk song celebrating men’s appreciation of other men, with tongue firmly lodged in cheek as to whether it’s platonic or romantic.
There’s undoubtedly further minutiae to be explored and features to be broken down, but as always, IDLES can speak for themselves. It’s one of the reasons why they’ve endured as they have—the ability to craft such a domineering presence, regardless of how that’s moulded by them. It’s what saw the post-punk boom in the first place, and while they’ve largely moved to an adjacent space of their own, the shockwaves still rattle inside them. As much as TANGK might feel like a total opposite to where IDLES began, their fearlessness is ever-present. They’re a band operating on their own terms now, prepared to go the distance and land upon what’s most fulfilling and creatively healthy for them. TANGK represents their most daring strike into the unknown, where the payoff is almost entirely dependent on what you put in. It is worth it, though, at the end of it all.
For fans of: shame, The Murder Capital, Sleaford Mods
‘TANGK’ by IDLES is released on 16th February on Partisan Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
