On their fifth LP, IDLES mixes up their sound, losing their spirit in the process.
On TANGK, established post-punk band IDLES has forgone their angry, unrestrained sound in favor of experimentation. Incorporating new instruments, new producers, and a decidedly pop spirit, TANGK does the impossible: taking nearly all of the personality out of one of the most personality-driven bands of the last decade.
Gone is the wiry, incisive guitar that cuts through IDLES’ most signature songs. On TANGK, it’s traded for more varied but much flatter instrumentation: saxophone lines that feel cut-and-pasted; dull, lifeless drums; cloying piano. Helmed by producers Kenny Beats and Nigel Godrich (of Radiohead fame), TANGK feels identity-less. This is clearest on lead single “Dancer,” an upbeat tune featuring vocals from James Murphy and Nancy Whang of LCD Soundsystem. It is precisely at the moment that Murphy and Whang’s vocals kick in that this song loses its feet and the band seems to disconnect from itself. The song becomes painfully overblown, losing any sense of direction it had.
TANGK employs the positive lyrical bent of 2018’s Joy as an Act of Resistance without its ferocity, with all the wind knocked out. The songs on Joy were more focused, pointed, and funny; TANGK is vague and muddled. Where the band’s adoption of a more varied, occasionally somber sound on 2021’s Crawler felt pointed, matched to the time, here it feels like nothing but deflation. The variation that IDLES have adopted here seems to work against them, creating something homogenous and dull. For a band that built its sound on confrontation, they take very few swings.
IDLES’ political bent seems to be at its all-time weakest, with the vague idea of love working as the album’s central thread. “Love is the thing” singer Joe Talbot declares, over and over, without offering up much to conjure that feeling or expand on it. In putting their political inclinations on the backburner, IDLES has joined many of their peers in eschewing their punk sensibilities (most notably, Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson ending a show early after a fan threw a Palestinian flag onstage late last year).
There are certainly moments of triumph on this album: the stormy guitar on “Gift Horse,” the twangy pre-chorus of “Roy,” Talbot’s restrained vocals on “A Gospel.” The strongest moment of the album comes on “Grace,” a downbeat, stormy meditation on piety. Here the band presents something other than self-assured over-optimism, letting a moment of vulnerability act as the capsule for the albums thesis (“Love if the fing.”) It feels poignant, though, that the music video for this song is an AI reinterpretation of the video for Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Though IDLES isn’t quite in milquetoast Coldplay territory yet, some of these songs sound closer to it than IDLES’ Brutalism.
As Yard Act prepares to release a decidedly pop album (see recent single “We Make Hits”), Fontaines D.C. sees a moment of TikTok fame, and Black Country, New Road continues to tour their newfound twee-pop sound, it feels like the curtains are closing on the wave of British post-punk (or post-rock, or post-Brexit-new-wave) that emerged in the late 2010’s. It seems impossible that a moment founded on scrappiness could sustain itself much longer. Still, it’s hard to see something so exciting go out with such a whimper.
Grade: B-