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.
Nigel Godrich, sometimes referred to as the sixth member of Radiohead, co-produced Tangk, alongside Idles guitarist Mark Bowen and go-to console jockey Kenny Beats, opening the door to further adventurous sound-making. Drones, blurry whines, instrumental ad libs and synth-like hoverings percolate away in the background of a number of Tangk’s tracks, adding depth and hue.
What’s more, frontman Joe Talbot does less seething and more singing. He delivers a wider palette of emotions – sometimes delicately, sometimes soulfully; employing a little sprechgesang in places. There’s even a waltzing piano track, A Gospel. Billed as an album of love songs, Tangk moves Idles further along the line demarcated by 2021’s Crawler; that of a band growing out of a well-understood niche and into a wider kind of power. If there is a bridge between the two records, it’s Crawler’s mighty, old-timey waltz The Beachland Ballroom, where Talbot really flexed his inner crooner.
He doesn’t entirely abandon ferocity and kneejerk pronouncements though. A more route-one song called Hall & Oates thrashes away in vintage style. Talbot’s intense delivery of Dancer makes dancing sound more like a fight (or a particularly lively bout of boot-knocking).
One of the album’s most well-realised tracks, Gift Horse, packs Idles’ usual explosive propulsion. It’s a bop. “He puts the foot down and see you later,” Talbot huffs, of the song’s equine subject, but he could well be describing his band. He still does a great line in distilled epigrams. “Don’t let the pricks take your inch to a mile,” he instructs on the prowling, minimal Pop Pop Pop.
Over the years, though, Idles’ frontman has been candid about his band’s modus operandi and politics, as well as his own background (a carer to his mother before her death) and his own flaws, not least his stuttering path towards sobriety. Tangk finds Talbot thinking hard about love, empathy and gratitude – not qualities you would casually associate with the cathartic fury Idles first brought to the table, but very much part and parcel of the path they have been on.
Both Talbot and guitarist and co-writer Bowen are parents; now, when Talbot sings about “my baby”, he most often means his young daughter, now aged four. (In 2017, he and his then partner lost their first daughter, Agatha, who was stillborn.) On Gift Horse, it’s “his baby” who, with guileless logic, doesn’t see the point of kneeling before a new king. “Fuck the king, he ain’t the king, she’s the king!” concludes Talbot crudely, but accurately. “No God, no king, I said love is the thing,” he underlines on Grace; a sentiment that recurs on Tangk.
Writing in the Big Issue, Talbot expounded a kind of manifesto for where Idles are now. Quoting bell hooks’s All About Love and Aesop’s Fables, he writes: “I soon came to realise that if I want empathy and grace, I have to first emit empathy and grace. I realised with Tangk that I wanted love. I needed love. So I had to make love and emit love.”
Hence an album of love songs – to a man, to horses and a new relationship – and a novel coining, Pop Pop Pop’s “freudenfreude”; the opposite of schadenfreude – feeling joy at others’ joy. Mostly, Tangk succeeds in shunting Idles along towards a place where they can sound bigger without going faster.
On songs such as the slow-building ballad Roy, they get there. At the climax, Bowen’s guitar is barely recognisable as a fuzzy Doppler stutter, drummer Jon Beavis is more than up to job of incrementally notching up the pressure and Talbot is howling “baby, baby, baby” with a murky kind of soul. There is often hand-wringing about where the next festival headliners are going to come from. No longer just parochial rabble rousers, Idles are moving on up.