Joe Talbot treats love like a four-letter word—meant to be shouted, loudly, like a bludgeon to the head. “Look at the card I bought/It says ‘I love you,’” the Idles frontman barked on 2018’s Joy as an Act of Resistance. In the intervening years, his own life experience—the birth of a child, a divorce, a new relationship—has only intensified the word’s meaning and laid bare the power it has over our relationships. While he claims that every Idles song is ultimately about love, leading up to the Bristol band’s fifth album, TANGK, Talbot honed his focus on the subject, reading bell hooks’ powerful 2000 treatise All About Love. But where hooks writes, “To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice,” Talbot approaches the topic with a typically broad sense of authority and indignation. On TANGK, Idles smooth their rougher edges as they explore love in all of its facets—it would be their warmest and most melodic record to date, if only Talbot could get out of his own way.
Writing about Idles’ most recent record, 2021’s Crawler, for this website, Stuart Berman wondered if, after a few false starts on an otherwise dark and driving record, they could go “full Kid A” and make the ambitious leap to a more experimental sound. The band seems to have taken his suggestion literally, re-engaging studio wizard Nigel Godrich to co-produce TANGK along with Kenny Beats, who formed an unlikely partnership with the band on their 2020 record Ultra Mono, and Idles guitarist Mark Bowen. The combined influences of each collaborator—Kenny Beats’ taut programmed drums, Godrich’s emphasis on melody and analog tape loops—mesh surprisingly well considering the producers’ disparate backgrounds. On “Gift Horse,” a thrumming bassline gives way to a kick drum that matches the elegant, muscular pacing of its equestrian subject, finding a phosphorescent midpoint between steely electronica and post-punk. “Grace” layers reverberating synths atop familiar drum and bass arrangements, lending a spectral, almost intangible quality to the song that Talbot echoes as he reaches for a thin falsetto. Lest you think Idles are not self-aware of this softer mode, the video for “Grace” is a shot-for-shot remake of Coldplay’s “Yellow” featuring a deep-faked Chris Martin.
In Idles, Godrich saw a band he could mold, gently, in his image: “I thought it would be interesting to see how they would translate if he was a little bit more musical, if he sang more,” he said in a recent interview. Indeed, the record opens with a piano, padded drums, and Talbot’s textured croon, which does bring to mind Chris Martin. Perhaps counterintuitively for a frontman known for gnarled roars, it’s the most expressive he’s sounded. On “A Gospel,” a song that originally began as an iPhone demo from Bowen, featherlight piano and fluttering strings accompany Talbot’s wispy vocals, finding a softness just as emotionally potent as his fiercest howl. Closer “Monolith” oozes to life with a murky synth and a thin, trembling vocal from Talbot. But here, as his voice melts into a crackling saxophone, we’re left with an impressionistic glance, one that lingers after Talbot’s final note. It’s a welcome pared-back approach after a discography full of kitchen-sink catchphrase soup.
Still, even Godrich’s influence couldn’t shake the band of its worst habits. The veteran producer was “astounded and disarmed” to discover Talbot’s unorthodox writing style, closer to a rap cypher than a rock frontman, of coming to the studio without any lyrics, instead preferring to riff live on the mic. Talbot considered writing ahead of their sessions, but decided that it was “bullshit”; as a result, the record must work around his more bombastic improvisations. There’s his interjections of “Fuck the king” at the end of “Gift Horse,” the awkward rhyming scheme of “Freudenfreude” (a German word that’s the opposite of schadenfreude, essentially feeling joy at the success of others) with “joy on joy,” on “Pop Pop Pop,” and most glaringly, the clumsy refrain on “Hall & Oates,” an ode to lasting friendship (don’t check how the real Hall & Oates are doing) that rivals Drake’s son Adonis’ breakout single in its repetition of “My man.” Additional vocals from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang on “Dancer” are drowned out by Talbot’s crude bleats of “cheek to cheek,” evoking a bullfight more than a ballroom.
Talbot could stand to take a note from another one of his inspirations for the record, Aesop’s fable of The North Wind and The Sun. Rather than beating listeners into submission, like Aesop’s personified Wind, Idles works best when the band builds radiant warmth around Talbot’s softer vocals. There’s a subtlety to writing about love that Talbot misses on this record—it’s a topic that’s often best gestured at, rather than bossed around. Press materials note that the word “love” appears 29 times throughout the record, and yet the songs that speak to the feelings undergirding that powerful emotion—the exhilaration of romantic attraction, the fear of abandonment—don’t mention the topic directly at all. On TANGK, Idles seem poised to let down their ironclad armor and reveal a far more interesting and nuanced band, just as soon as Talbot is ready to relinquish his stubborn and self-defeating grasp.
