Bristol punks IDLES are one of the few English guitar lad bands who are punching up through the underground with something to say — helping to finally banish second- and third-hand indie bands still waiting for the second coming of Oasis.
Londoners Shame go some way towards tipping the seesaw back to socially-engaged, angry guitar music, but they’re really a PG version of IDLES. Still, every new release by a band like IDLES and Shame is further muck kicked on top of the coffin of landfill indie –even if outliers like Catfish and the Bottlemen are playing arenas and IDLES are playing to a few hundred in a Dublin club.
IDLES’ aptly-titled 2017 debut album Brutalism is an unflinching rail against Brexit Britain, with all the venom and wry humour of Sleaford Mods and Fath White Family. They stand out in the same way as the criminally overlooked 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster got swallowed up in the middle of the mediocre ‘New Rock Revolution’ bands in the mid-noughties.
IDLES’ new album Joy as an Act of Resistance is another cathartic war cry that takes on matters as diverse as asshole lad culture (Never Fight a Man with a Perm) and the death of frontman Joe Talbot’s baby daughter on June, all adding to a gnarled, cathartic live show.
- IDLES play the Button Factory in Dublin tonight, Monday. Tickets are €16 here.
Moo Kid 