“There are, improbably, a couple of nods to ’80s romantic drama Dirty Dancing on Bristol punks Idles’ instant classic second album ‘Joy As An Act Of Resistance’. On the deceptively brooding ‘Love Song’, which pairs howling guitar lines (that could have been lifted from the start of a horror movie) with compassionate lyrics about the redemptive power of romantic love, frontman Joe Talbot roars, “I c”
“UK punk outfit IDLES returns with an album that improves on the brutal and politically charged style the band delivered on their debut last year. One of the best punk albums of the decade without question!”
“IDLES make sense of modern chaos on the utterly essential Joy as an Act of Resistance”
“IDLES turn trauma and anger into affirming lessons on Joy As an Act of Resistance, crafting a cathartic masterpiece that wears its heart--broken, but still beating--on its sleeve.”
“My mother works ten hours, five days a week. My stories are hardly the amplified fables of class-struggle and political deception as in ‘Brutalism’, but it does seem like IDLES are a band people feel a certain ownership of. Not that long ago the Conservative cabinet quit in such volume that it wouldn’t look out of place in an IKEA; BoJo and David Davies were rumoured – jokingly, I think – to enter”
“The riffs come hard, fuzzy, and fast on the Bristol punks’ deeply passionate second album—and the platitudes follow close behind.”
