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IDLES this weekend – recorded just last year, July 10th to be exact, during the fabled Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
After spending eight years honing their live performances, IDLES released their debut album, Brutalism, in 2017 to critical acclaim, Their second album, Joy as an Act of Resistance (2018), increased their exposure significantly, and was followed by their first UK number 1 album, Ultra Mono, in 2020. The band released their fourth album, Crawler, in 2021. Tangk, their fifth studio album, was released this year.
Welsh frontman Joe Talbot was born in Newport and spent his late teenage years in Devon. Talbot and bassist Adam Devonshire met in sixth form college in Exeter. Talbot and Devonshire then both moved to Bristol where they studied at the St Matthias Campus of the University of the West of England and decided to start a band. According to Talbot, “It took us a long time to get productive because we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing at all, we were fucking terrible for a long time.” Talbot and Devonshire went on to open the Bat-Cave Night Club in Bristol. Guitarist Mark Bowen moved from Belfast to study in Bristol and met Talbot while on the DJ circuit.
IDLES first release was the Welcome EP in 2012. By 2014 the band comprised Talbot, Devonshire, guitarists Mark Bowen and Andy Stewart, and drummer Jon Beavis. They released a second EP, Meat, which saw them embrace a much harder-edged direction from their early work, and Meta, an EP of remixes, in 2015, and then started writing songs for their debut album.
IDLES’ music has been associated with punk rock and related genres including post-punk, hardcore punk, and post-hardcore. Talbot rejected the punk label; in 2017, he said: “We’re not a post punk band. I guess we have that motorik, engine-like drive in the rhythm section that some post punk bands have, but we have plenty of songs that aren’t like that at all.”
Thanks Wikipedia – now you know why I kick in money every year.
Crank it up – it’s the weekend after all.
