IDLES

Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan are trying to describe the sort of sounds that tear through the new Idles record. “KRRRING! KRRRONG! KRRRONK!” they shout, gesticulating widly over Zoom. They could’ve saved themselves the effort: the new Idles album sounds like the sky falling.

Ultra Mono is the band’s third outing, and follows the Mercury-nominated Joy As An Act of Resistance, an album that broke the quintet into the mainstream spotlight and almost broke its members in two, both physically and mentally. Idles are a touring band. They exist in order to share a dialogue with the people on the other side of the barrier and, in supporting Joy, they played about 400 shows in just a few years.

Onto their shoulders the band hefted the record’s mix of grief and anger – vocalist Joe Talbot sang of the death of his daughter Agatha and railed against toxic masculinity and the rise of right-wing populism – and set off for rooms that grew in size as the miles disappeared beneath the wheels of their bus. At different times, it all became too much.

“Even now I’m still having issues with my mental health because I didn’t stand up to what my problems were when we were finishing touring ” Kiernan says. “I just thought, ‘I’m tired, that’s all it is’. But it wasn’t. I was depressed. I have two prolapsed discs. I was in pain every day. Gigging with that ate away at me. We took three months off post-, which I