IDLES Announce New Album “TANGK” & Share Lead Single “Dancer”

Bristol UK’s IDLES have announced today their forthcoming fifth album, TANGK, that follows on from 2021’s Crawler. In an explosive run of unerringly stirring albums, TANGK, pronounced tank with a whiff of the g, is an onomatopoeic reference to the lashing way the band imagined the guitars sounding that has grown into a sort of sigil for living in love. TANGK is at once sprawling and focused, imaginative and immediate and is now available for pre-order here.

Out today is the first single and video, the throbbing and scuzzy Dancer, that also features LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang. Rattling bass and ricocheting guitar give vocalist Joe Talbot space to talk about sweat and sex on the dancefloor. It is lascivious and playful and positive, the ecstatic sound of at least a temporary fix. In the improvised hook, Talbot offers IDLES‘ essential new mantra: “I give myself to you/As long as you move on the floor.”

Talbot is singing about the rapture of a new relationship, but he is also singing about the special dynamic between IDLES and their fans, or IDLES and the world at large. This is a band’s vow to keep lifting and fighting for themselves and their listeners, to keep offering the grim persistence of joy and hope and love and wonder as long as that’s what anyone needs to survive. It is a love song the same way that TANGK is a love album, open to anyone who requires something to shout out loud in order to fend off any encroaching sense of the void, now or forever.

Where IDLES were once set on taking the world’s piss, squaring off with strong jaws against the perennially entitled, and exorcising personal trauma in real time, they have arrived in this new act to offer the fruits of such perseverance: love, joy, and indeed gratitude for the mere opportunity of existence. This music thrives not in spite of our problems but because of them. If we don’t look after ourselves and one another who will?