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The peak moments of Idles’ songs are like when football fans explode into a beer-throwing, ballistic frenzy as a goal is scored. The mood is one of euphoria, release and community. Guitars and drums are pushed to their limits while vocals are bellowed with clenched fists and straining neck cords. Togetherness is the point of the exercise, a shared experience of intense feeling.
The Bristol band are good at this full-throttle sound. They have got four albums out of it and won a sizeable following. But signs of change have been brewing. Their previous album, 2021’s Crawler, introduced a sharper rhythmic edge to their music: it was made with US rap producer Kenny Beats. Now comes a bigger gear shift with their fifth album.
TANGK’s title is a made-up word for how the five-piece want their guitars to sound. Kenny Beats once again joins guitarist Mark Bowen as co-producer. They are supplemented by a significant new recruit, Radiohead’s regular producer Nigel Godrich. His hand can be detected in opening track “Idea01”. Instead of the instantly revved-up action of their early albums, here we find the tinkling sound of arpeggiated keyboards and the ominous pulse of a bassline: the soundworld of a Radiohead song.
The danger of a band altering its sound is that it might end up sounding like other bands. “Grace” finishes with the same sustained piano chord as The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”, a truly risky act of comparison. Meanwhile “Roy” hinges on a passage of singing during which frontman Joe Talbot seems to transform himself into the spit of Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner. But these echoes take place within an album that creates its own distinctive identity. Idles’ move into a more reflective mode hasn’t led them to become a reflection of other acts.
Talbot doesn’t entirely dispense with his usual bull-in-a-china-shop approach. “Gift Horse” is a stomping rager in which he hollers “Look at him go!” amid a blizzard of drums and riffs. The mistitled “Hall & Oates”, a tribute to bromance named after the now warring smooth-pop duo, is a basic blast of punk noise. But elsewhere he adopts a gruffly tender tone.
“A Gospel” finds him crooning about love and vulnerability over a subtle shimmer of pizzicato strings and piano. “Pop Pop Pop” finds an intriguingly moody new register for the heavy basslines and guitar distortion of their former sound. TANGK aims for a different spot and hits it.
★★★★☆
‘TANGK’ is released by Partisan Records
