IDLES Joy as an Act of Resistance
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hat a year it’s been for IDLES. It feels like mighty second album ‘Joy as an Act of Resistance’ was never going to be absent from this glimmering list, and rightly so. In the middle of finishing off festival season duties, we caught up with frontman Joe Talbot to reflect on the journey of the record so far. You’ve had so many beautiful moments off the back of this album, have you had a chance to step back and look at the journey? I don’t tend to sit back and look at it because I’m in it and that’s enough. I’m not surprised by anything that’s happened to us because we created this narrative over twelve years. We’ve meticulously built this journey, there haven’t been any big surprises because we’ve planned this and worked our asses off. When I say we planned this, we didn’t plan to get shortlisted for the Hyundai Mercury Prize, we didn’t plan to tour America and sell all of the dates out. You have everything in small and manageable chunks, we work hard for those, everything is in our sight all the time. It’s all a gift, that’s not bulls***. This isn’t Saturday morning TV, it’s a gift and I love it. A lot has been said about the lyrical themes of the record, but boiling it down to the core, it’s just your feelings based on circumstance? That’s absolutely true. It’s always circumstantial, the album we’re writing now is circumstantial. It’s something I want to explore
with the next album after the third one as well. I’m not good at writing stories and extracting myself in terms of inventing characters and stuff. All I have is what I have in front of me. As a point of honesty, I can’t create something that isn’t there. So this album isn’t going to be about loss because I haven’t lost anything. I’ve lost something before, momentarily now, I’m not in a point of loss. I’m in a point of fear and anger of where we’re at, I’m in a point of contemplation and I’m in a point of building something. I’ve got to be in the moment.
“As a point of honesty, I can’t create something that isn’t there.”
The album was also born out of momentum off the back of ‘Brutalism’: was it a natural continuation for you? It’s always continuing. The momentum hasn’t stopped from the second album to the third either. Once we become bored then it will get boring, we’ve always got things to talk about, explore and improve on so we’ll just keep going until it doesn’t work anymore. Nowadays, there’s a lack of pompousness in our sort of music because there’s not a lot of money in it. So you can’t stick around and celebrate the same album for three years because nobody will listen and that’s how it is. I think that perpetual motion of art and culture moves so rapidly in our country, that’s something we try to stay on top of. That definitely keeps us on our toes.
44 DIYMAG.COM In The Running... 2019 Hyundai Mercury Prize