Idles Brutalism – Por cinco años

Being honest, nobody had ever really heard of them, although Idles had been fermenting in Bristol one way or another for years by the time their debut album was released in 2017. A couple of years before this anonymous, un-rock star looking quintet had released a track called The Idles Chant, an awkward sounding tribute to The Monks 1966 number of the same name; it’s fair to say expectations for Brutalism weren’t exactly skyscraping.

An early impression was required, one that opener Heel/Heal delivered like a wrecking ball to the solar plexus. With the instruments raking at a hardcore tempo, lead Idler Joe Talbot growled the now legendary opening couplet “I want to move into a Bovis Home/And make a list of everything I own,” ridiculing in the first ten seconds the utter hopelessness of consumerism-as-a-disease Britain. From that moment right to the final notes of closer Slow Savage they had everyone’s attention.

Recorded as Talbot was caring for a mother in the final stages of her life, Brutalism inevitably mined his own personal darkness but also somehow the collective post-Brexit referendum anguish felt by many, even if it didn’t do so overtly. Laugh out loud funny, confrontational and raw, it had been decades since punk had been subverted this way, even if it felt that some of the perfect storm it threw was reached by accident.

Five years later it remains an outlier from a period which was often culturally at war with itself, even more so now in today’s polemically escalating world. To the band’s due it’s a construct which they’ve avoided in the half decade since, favouring experimentation and – occasionally – falling into the trap of promoting their message rather than their music. Now Grammy nominees courtesy of their last release Crawler, the time of novelty tunes has gone, but the impetus that Brutalism created by sheer force of will seems everlasting.

You can read the exclusive new feature in full here.