MY FAVOURITE SOUNDS - IDLES

The Bristol Band Idles have been a favourite since their first album Brutalism was released in 2018. I’d wait for everyone to go to bed and then pour a whisky and marvel that music so new, so fresh, so moving (the lead singer’s mother died during recordings), could suddenly appear on my radar. I tried it on my kids and while Lucian is a fan, sort of, Willa just looked at me funny. And Sam, if she’d heard it, would have insisted I leave.

The next couple of albums were less impressive - more strident but less true, less poetic and investigative, a band not quite sure of itself - but they grew the audience dramatically.

The band has toured almost constantly (I’ve seen them twice in Toronto) and in 2021 Crawler, their fourth album was released to wide acclaim. It was their best work to date, more layered and more experimental than anything that came before. The single here, “The Beachland Ballroom” is from that record. It is a woozy, painful slip-slide of a song with a perfect video.

A fifth album, Tangk, came out this year. And it’s Crawler’s equal, though it took me a while to realize that. You walk past my house late and there’s a good chance I’m in there somewhere, headphones cranked, wishing I was a better dancer, or a lot younger.