Nice guys don’t always finish last. Not in the case of Idles, anyway. On Glastonbury’s Park Stage last year, the Bristol five-piece looked out at the moshing masses, stretching as far as the eye could see, past the multicoloured lookout and down the hill. It was the culmination of another sold-out tour; a top five, Mercury prize-shortlisted album; years of hard work and a whole lot of heartache. Frontman Joe Talbot, then aged 35, began to cry; his wife, Beth, with their newborn in a sling, ran out to comfort him, before they launched back into their crushing set. And in that moment, broadcast nationwide, their status as the next Big British Rock Band was certified.
“Vulnerability is the armour,” say the band, and it is for them a kind of mission statement, as are their politics of inclusivity. Their breakthrough album, 2017’s Brutalism, was written as Talbot was caring for his mum, who had a long-term illness and died during the recording; its songs cleaved into topics like toxic masculinity, “impotent male rage”, mental health and white privilege with the urgency of post-punk and the blistering subtlety of a tank in a rose garden. While Brutalism snarled at Brexit and the Tories, its follow-up, Joy as an Act of Resistance, preached celebrating your flaws and love as power, . One song, June, is dedicated to the Talbots’ first child, who tragically died stillborn.
Talbot, guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire and drummer Jon Beavis, look like any other heavy band to me – hairy, tattooed, possibly missing teeth – but they insist they are the sort you don’t usually get to see on magazine covers. Their ambition is to turn what being in a successful band often used to mean (ego, indulgence, self-loathing) on its head. “We want to change the narrative,” they say. “To be subversive as a rock band is to be loving, and to show compassion and empathy.”
They trade in unflinching candour and hyper-sincerity, but they also snog each other on stage. One of Talbot’s most memorable lines on the song Samaritans is when he inverts Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl to “I kissed a boy and I liked it”, which is often followed by a smooch with Bowen during their shows.
Changing the narrative is presumably why I’m meeting two of Idles at the ungodly hour of 9am in a hotel boardroom, and not in a pub. Talbot, tightly wound yet unguarded (Mike Skinner of the Streets, with whom he has recently collaborated, jokingly said Talbot reminded him of Pete Doherty), is sporting a loud shirt. Mustachioed Bowen is a touch more considered, and wearing a suit. The former dentist had gained a reputation for playing shows in his pants, but it was time to smarten up, he says. A meeting with one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds can have that effect. “I started dressing differently this week because I had a Zoom call with Warren Ellis,” who appears on their new album, Ultra Mono, says Bowen. “He was immaculately dressed. I thought he’d be wearing slippers, but he had on the most beautiful oxblood brogues.”
Sartorial awareness is not the only thing that’s new. In the past two years, Idles have gone from DIY grafters (they formed the band because they “felt there was a lack of vigour and authenticity in indie music”) attracting a fiercely loyal fan army and playing 190 gigs a year to being the sort of band who scrub up and go to the Brit awards. It felt jarring. They had a moment on the red carpet, watching George Ezra glide along being interviewed, and Bowen thought: “Is this the stuff that we do now? Because this isn’t good.” Paranoia began to seep in. They’d packed in heavy drinking while on tour, in order to cope with their mounting schedule. I have interviewed them once before, last February, and Talbot remembers that back then he was “trapped in the feeling of being watched”.
There was criticism, too. Every great guitar movement has beef, which is all part of the fun, and last year Idles became the punch bag for the punk proletariat. In February, Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson accused them of “appropriating a working-class voice” and called their take on music as a force for change “cliched” and “patronising”. Then arch dadaists Fat White Family piled on, calling Idles “self-neutering middle-class boobs”. The Quietus described them as “emotional indie uncles”. For others, their distillation of leftwing politics and social issues comes off as simplistic, even box-ticking.
First, says Talbot: “I never said I was working-class,” although, he adds, criticisms like Williamson’s “devalue how hellish two of our bandmates’ upbringings were who were working-class”. Nor is he, to use a phrase he doesn’t like at all, “sloganeering”. “I’m not virtue signalling,” he says. “I’m not hiding behind any sort of surrealist bullshit. I’m saying: this is what I believe in.” On paper, he says, “I don’t think our message comes across as well. People think: ‘Fuck off, you cheesy bastards.’” But on stage is where they are loud and clear. “We’re a band that has to be seen to be believed. You come to our show and you believe us.”
But when Talbot has an axe to grind, he can’t just drop it. “I do hold on to those grudges,” he says wickedly. “Their grudges, not my grudges. They make me powerful.” They also wind him up. “It makes me angry,” he says, tensing. “I was a very violent person. So yes, one day I genuinely had to stop myself driving up to London and finding him [Lias Saoudi, Fat White Family frontman] because I go through fits and pangs of, like: ‘Fuck off, just leave us alone.’”
And so, instead of ignoring the haters, Idles have risen to them, and then above them. No more mister nice guys. In Ultra Mono, they’ve made a massive-sounding third album that streamlines everything they’ve done before, while taking aim at their critics.
“Our remit is to be honest,” says Bowen, “so whenever we get told those things, it niggles at us, so we talk about it.” Their song The Lover, he says, is the idea of “‘Fuck you, I’m the lover, kill them with kindness.’”
Kindness, yes, although a slight antagonism lingers. Guest appearances on Ultra Mono include Ellis, David Yow from the Jesus Lizard but also, less likely, Jamie Cullum. They’ve “done things on this album that are deliberately to piss people off”, says Bowen cheerfully. “It’s annoying for some people that Jamie Cullum would be on the album, and it’s annoying that we would do it deliberately as well.”
Compounding styles from riot grrrl to mid-2000s dance-punk, the album is visceral enough to transcend the indie in-fighting and instead “stand up against pop music”, says Bowen, referencing the spacious minimalism of Billie Eilish and Kanye West’s Yeezus, an aural beefiness that was helped, in part, by additional production from Los Angeles hip-hopper Kenny Beats.
Talbot and Bowen came up with the concept for the album while they were both taking time off to be with their babies. Did the other band members not feel left out? “Yes,” they chorus, without hesitation. As Bowen and Talbot focused on fatherhood, Kiernan, Devonshire and Beavis had started to write a new record. But when Talbot and Bowen revealed their plans, says the former, it was clear that it was “not [like] their thing. It was painful.” Not being in a room together from the outset had meant that “they didn’t have anything to go on except for intermittent phone calls, basically telling them what they were doing was not what we were trying to do.”
It will be the “Marmite” test of their career so far, they say (though it’s one that’s bound to propel them to the heights of arena-fillers Biffy Clyro and Muse). Talbot had a clear vision. He felt he wasn’t deliberate enough with Joy as an Act of Resistance, and so Ultra Mono – the clue is in the title – is a conscious attempt to double down on his beliefs: anti-racism, anti-misogyny, anti-classism and so on. “There’s wishy-washy politicism in popular music,” he says. “Why go halfway? Our government hates the poor, otherwise they wouldn’t treat them so badly. There is a class war in this country, and I just wanted to say it as clearly as possible.
“I will not apologise for my gender, my race, my class,” he continues. “All I can do is use my privilege in as productive and beautiful and loving a way as possible. I feel like I’ve got it out there properly and the rest of it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t go to bed at night going, ‘Should I have said that?’”
Another track, Model Village, is about small-minded patriotism, observing people “saluting flags ’cause it’s British”. “I was done to death with this country when I wrote that song,” he says. “I’m just frustrated at the relationship that a lot of people in this country seem to have with the vision of an empire that’s based on murder, mass genocide, and rekindling that with a quirky phrase like Brexit is dangerous and stupid.” He doesn’t believe that rightwingers are necessarily to blame for everything that’s wrong with Britain, but he hopes that Idles’ music can turn heads. “We get messages all the time,” he begins… “This sounds like I’m making it up [but] I genuinely had a guy [who said], ‘I just want to say you’re changing people’s hearts and minds.’ Even people that were on the right and now on the left – he was like: ‘That was me.’”
Idles, in a way, are like mass therapy. “The topics in our songs are things we’ve gone through,” says Bowen. “Joe’s probably dealt with more than other people. We are people who have made changes to our lives – for progress.” And relatability, they say, is important, not being super-famous and out of reach. Ultimately, Talbot says, Ultra Mono is about trying to be the best versions of themselves. “You don’t like us? Fine,” he says. “This is an album of full self-acceptance, and that means going: ‘I get it, you don’t get it. But I’m still here and I still 100% believe in everything.’”
• Ultra Mono is out on 25 September via Partisan Records
