“The conclusion we’ve come to,” says IDLES guitarist and sound architect Mark Bowen, “is that Joe’s a soul singer or a blues singer.” That’s the first thing you notice on IDLES’ excellent fifth album. Joe Talbot, imposing frontman for the UK group, has mostly stopped shouting and is putting his powerful pipes to new use as a singer. As hinted at on 2022’s CRAWLER, Talbot has a rich, weathered voice that the band put to good use on TANGK, including a few songs that dip a few toes into ‘pop’ territory. “That stuff is so hard to write without it sounding super cheesy,” Bowen says, dialing in via Zoom from his home in Belfast. “I have so much deference for your Coldplays, your The Nationals, people that write that kind of music.” IDLES are still IDLES though, even on something like “Roy,” which is ostensibly an old-school rock n’ roll ballad where guitars roar and disintegrate as Talbot belts out “Baby, Baby, Baby.”
Bowen is one third of the three-headed beast who produced TANGK, the other two being Kenny Beats, who worked on CRAWLER, and Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich who first worked with IDLES in 2022 on their episode of his revived “From the Basement” YouTube series. While he originally didn’t want any new cooks in the IDLES kitchen, Bowen couldn’t say no when Godrich expressed interest in working on CRAWLER‘s follow-up, especially after seeing how Godrich helped recontextualize songs from that album. Turns out that the old “third wheel” adage didn’t apply here, nor did Bowen’s assumptions that Godrich would be the album’s more commercial center of gravity that softened Bowen and Beats’ disruptor tendencies.
Talbot was at the heart of TANGK‘s evolving sound. His desire to make an album about love and to sing on the whole thing fueled Bowen to create music befitting these openhearted emotions. Their second album was called Joy As an Act of Resistance, and this one could have been titled Joy As an Act of Joy. In fact,”TANGK” is an “onomatopoeic reference to the lashing way he imagined the guitars sounding that has grown into a sort of sigil for living in love.” Beats, Godrich, and the band decamped to a seaside retreat in the South of France to make the record where Talbot, though his lyrical intentions were stated, came with almost no words prepared, waiting for the music to inspire him.
TANGK is like no record IDLES have made before. It may win over folks who never quite jibed with the band’s early brute force sprechgesang punk. Yet even on songs like “Grace,” easily the poppiest song they have ever put to tape, they retain that same intensity that had audiences going mental. “A big learning point in this album,” Bowen says, “was that we didn’t have to pay deference to us. We didn’t have to go, oh, this has to be IDLES. It has to fit into IDLES’ genre. It doesn’t. It will be IDLES at the end.”
Over a 45-minute transatlantic video conversation, Mark and I talked about the sound of TANGK, how the tour for CRAWLER shaped its sound, how touring with LCD Soundsystem changed the way they played live, the influence of fellow Bristolians Portishead on the band, how three producers were better than one, riding a mechanical bull in a dress, and more.
You’re one of three producers on TANGK, along with Kenny Beats and Nigel Godrich, and you’re all credited together. I’m just wondering how that works with three very different people. It almost sounds like the setup to a joke or something.
Like an Englishman and an Irishman and an American walking into a bar, and try and make an album.[Laughs] It’s an interesting one. So when we got to the end of CRAWLER, I was quite adamant that we don’t need to work with any producers anymore. Kenny is [an exception] to that. Kenny is an integral part of the IDLES’ experience. He is just part of our album making process, I would say. Because he’s one of the greatest producers on planet earth. But then we did the Basement Sessions with Nigel, and I was quite taken by his interpretation of those songs from CRAWLER. And then his engineer talked to us at a festival, saying that Nigel would be interested in working with us. And immediately, I was like, “Nah, nah, nah, no more.” What we’ve got with Kenny is, it’s all about transgression, and no solemnity to any process. We’re taking bits off every kind of style of music, and every kind of mode of production, and any kind of perspective on things.
What I didn’t want to do was get an established producer with an established kind of process. Kenny’s process is very like mine, it’s very open to new experiences, and very open to others’ experience as a collaborative experience. I was worried that an established producer would just push their established process. But then I was like, it is Nigel Godrich. He’s pretty great, he’s got good credence. And I’d learn a lot. So I was like, “we learn loads and it can’t be bad, and if it is bad, we’ll work it out.” Luckily, Nigel’s not any of those things I was expecting from an established producer. He’s an incredible engineer, and he’s incredibly open-minded to pushing us to progress. And we really wanted to experiment more with sounds and use production as a writing tool rather than the writing informing the production, if that makes sense. So Nigel was great with all that. We were doing a lot of tape loops, a lot of old school techniques, but very cleverly done and very creatively used. So we did a lot of that.
Nigel was a bit like, “Oh, I’ve never really worked with another producer before that wasn’t the artist.” I know that Radiohead and Beck would certainly be involved in their own production. But it’s hard not to work with Kenny. So I was just like, “just talk to him. As soon as you talk to him, you’ll get it.” He’s so enthusiastic. He’s just very good at making people feel comfortable. So a friendship struck up between them. Mine and Nigel’s was already fully bloomed, and that was great. So we had this dynamic where everyone was kind of deferring to each other. No one took a real driving seat. It was a very, very collaborative experience and it was great. Nigel was the bottleneck which we went through. So when we got to France, Kenny and Joe went into one room, and they worked on vocals the whole time. I think Joe had a lot of stuff to work through on this album. Vocal performance wise, lyrically what he was trying to say, and how he was trying to convey it. And that needed microscopic examination from Kenny and real understanding of Joe’s process. And it needs a lot of patience, and Joe needs a 6’7″ intimidating man to work with him. Because sometimes he needs to be told to shut up. And Kenny’s the guy to do that, so that’s good. [Laughs]
Me and Nigel worked mainly on instruments in the other room, and that was working with the tape loops, synthesizers, and really working with the production. I do a lot of guitar synthesis stuff now, running a lot of the instruments through this thing that I made during CRAWLER called The CRAWLER Machine. I learned a lot from him. Maybe he learned from me, you’d have to ask him. Then every day we kind of coalesce and show each other what we’ve done, and then we kind of spawn off that. It was a really fruitful experience. It felt very, very collaborative and very supportive. Well, Kenny was very supportive. Nigel was secretly supportive, but was really pushing us. When I first met Nigel to talk about working on the album, I said we wanted to progress, we wanted to really experiment with our songwriting, with harmony, with our melodies, and with our approach to using electronics, and using different sounds and stuff like that. Nigel never gave up on that premise, so when we would be out of our depth completely and be like, “Fuck let’s just do something uncomfortable,” he was always just pushing, “Nah, nah, nah, keep going, keep going, keep going.” So it was great. Hopefully there’ll be another record with that trio.
Did you have a specific idea in mind for this album, or was it just picking up where CRAWLER left off, musically?
One of the big things was Joe started to sing on CRAWLER, and that was great. It was really exciting and we really wanted to push Joe into that territory. But the music that we’ve always made before is very… It’s caustic, it’s bombastic, it’s very discordant. It’s quite hard to find melody in that. If you sing melodies on top of that kind of noise rock, let’s call it, it can be a bit cheesy, a bit cringe. Especially with the kind of singing Joe does. The conclusion we’ve come to is that Joe’s a soul singer or a blues singer. More of a blues singer, I would say. What we had to do was learn a lot more about harmony, and melody in the songwriting. Music always comes first. Joe sings on top of it. So it was just that approach. So I was learning a lot about modes and things like that, and trying to push that, make it clear. So that was definitely the process going in.
I’ve definitely got a favorite angle with production, in that I like degraded stuff. So I like distorted, not crisp, beautiful drums. I like rough around the edges, and I love tape. Basically I’m trying to emulate Portishead at every possible opportunity. That is literally it. Portishead Third is by quite some margin my favorite album. So that’s it. I’m just constantly stealing from Geoff Barrow, basically. That’s my approach. I always want the creative side. You get that on CRAWLER, you get that on TANGK, you get this beautiful distortion. And it’s all in how the harmonics, especially in the upper harmonics, how they’re all distorted into each other and create this kind of roof and ceiling and warm hug around the rest of the sonics on the album.
On that note, on “Roy,” I love the atmospheric guitar on that. It feels like it’s falling apart as it’s being played…
Yeah. That was a big thing. On CRAWLER I’d gotten really into the guitar synthesis, and using the guitar as a primary oscillator and then using lots of effects on top of it. That one is actually, a Nigel job, going through this ridiculously overpriced thing, but it makes this incredible sound that’s sputtering and coughing and miserable, but very, very present. With that song, it’s called “Roy” because that was the name of the demo, because I had been listening to tons of Roy Orbison. And what I wanted to do was take a traditional old rock and roll, Roy Orbison style, “ding diddle-ing ding ding ding” 6/8 type guitar part. Originally I’d written it in 5/8, and we had that all laid out. What I wanted to do was take that, but have it very different, have it very distorted in places, lots of bits touching on old rock and roll, lots of bits touching on soul, but also just have these moments that are not representative of that. I think that, across the board on the album, what we’re trying to do is subvert any kind of conscious effort to align anything with genre. So I would say, what is that? What genre is that song, “Roy”? What genre is “POP POP POP”? It’s kind of hard to place. So “Roy,” you would be valid in saying it’s an old rock and roll song, or a soul song. It would also be valid to call it goth. The chorus-y guitars are kind of gothy. There was a lot of reference to Bauhaus when we’re writing that as well. And then on “POP POP POP,” you could at a stretch call it a garage song. Not garage rock, but UK Garage. So it’s just lots of things like that. I wanted to use lots of elements from other genres and collide them into one thing, but keep it very within that kind of pocket of IDLES. Nothing’s too pristine, nothing’s too contemporary-feeling about it.
As an example of the process for this record, I was hoping you could walk me through the creation of one of the songs. For me, “Grace” epitomizes the album’s kinder, gentler version of IDLES, and it also sounds very in the studio, more than some of the songs. So how did you do it?
“Grace” started from a place where Joe wanted to write a song with a kind of very obvious pop beat. So [imitates drum beat] across the board. It’s in loads and loads of pop songs, if you listen to that real straight beat that’s there. So we started with that, but we were like, “Right, well, how do we do that without it sounding like big pop.” So we did it on a LinnDrum. So that’s how it started off with that LinnDrum sound. Then Joe played the bass line, boom, boom, boom. That was initially all we had. And then Joe sang the vocals on it. It was the only thing Joe had recorded before we got into the studio, vocal wise. That was actually an interesting one, because we kept coming out at all sorts of different angles, and none of it was sounding right.
That stuff is so hard to write without it sounding super cheesy. I have so much deference for your Coldplay, your The National, people that write that kind of music. I have so much more deference to them now. I’m feeling really self-conscious about it, but maybe that’s coming from my background.
So we kept being like “it’s just not edgy enough. It doesn’t have enough of the”… We call it “violence.” So we added lots of really warped, distorted, chorusing, flanging type guitar sounds. And then there’s those big guitar strums that come into places. But it was really a mishmash of lots of different stuff. And it was about distorting and degrading stuff, so it just didn’t feel too clean, too polished. And there was a lot of debate. That was probably the song that there was the most debate about in the studio. It was the hardest one to write because I think we weren’t too sure about it. But Kenny and Nigel were so confident in it, and they were pushing it hard. It felt almost a bit like it was too much of a step out of our comfort zone. Too much of us putting on someone else’s hat. It still feels a little bit like that. There’s so much baggage brought to that song, because of how difficult it was to write. It’s tough. So even the instrumental bit at the end, that’s us just going, this is too nice. Mash it all up. So we made all that noise at the end, and then the big nod to the Beatles at the end, the “A Day in the Life” thing. But yeah, that was fraught, that one. It’s kind of easier to talk about other songs to be honest.
Well, I think it turned out great and I think it still sounds like IDLES, so it’s not…
Thanks. Yeah, that was a big learning point on this album. What I thought we were getting Nigel in for was us to experiment and for him to tether us back, to not lose sight of the core of the band. But actually what he did was push us as far as we could possibly go. He’s not a fan of the band. He hasn’t listened to Brutalism, he hasn’t listened to Joy as an Act of Resistance. And that’s good, because he’s untethered. He’s got no kind of concept on that. We used to always have these conversations, like, “Is this us?” While we were doing stuff. And what we learned in this album is, you don’t need to have that conversation. As long as we’re creating it, there’s so much of our DNA and our process and what we’re creating that, it will come through and it will feel like IDLES. Even if you did that, or “A Gospel,” which is like a piano song. There’s no drums on it. But that still comes across very much as an IDLES song, because it had some of our DNA in it. So yeah, that was a big learning point in this album, that we didn’t have to pay deference to us. We didn’t have to go, oh, this has to be IDLES. It has to fit into IDLES genre. It doesn’t. It will be IDLES at the end.
How much did the CRAWLER tour affect where TANGK was going? Basically, because of the pandemic you were touring two albums [CRAWLER and Ultra Mono] for the first time, right? That had to be an interesting experience just to see how audiences react. You didn’t get to learn from one thing before the next thing.
Yeah, it was really interesting. Ultra Mono didn’t get to see live audiences until CRAWLER had come out. So we had kind of moved on, but those songs were written specifically to be played live. They were written for bigger concert halls, and they bloody well came to life and then, it’s great. Works perfectly. So that was nice. It was nice to go to remind ourselves that that was our intention with that album, and that it came across. But the other thing was that, we learned a lot on CRAWLER because some stuff worked and some stuff didn’t. And that was in part down to how where we performed it in the set but also down to our energy and what we were getting from the songs while we were doing it. A lot of the CRAWLER stuff feels unfinished. I don’t think we were in a place to really take those songs and push them through as accomplished, finished articles. I listened to a few of those songs, and I’m now like, “We do that very differently.” Whereas TANGK is now the more accomplished kind of aspect of that. They’re definitely finished songs, and I can see the live set. It’s making sense to me now.
Speaking of touring, last summer you were out with LCD Soundsystem, and you ended up getting James Murphy and Nancy Whang to sing on “Dancer.” Did watching them every weekend influence IDLES at all?
Well, we’d finished the album by that point. Except for vocals that needed to be redone. We’re all massive fans of LCD Soundsystem. We’ve been going to see them since 2008 or something like that. Huge fans. And then now there’s the world’s biggest Band Romance going on. We just love them. Love them to pieces. I’m watching them every night. And watching how they tour has been a massive, massive change in our band. They’re so great with each other. They’re such a lovely bunch, and they do everything so well. They do everything so considered. And their live performance is the same. It’s like everything is considered within an inch of its life, and then the chaos is allowed to ensue out of that. So we learned a lot, especially how to go about this album live. They’re amazing people. Before the tour even happened, they were a reference point when writing “Dancer,” the dynamic between James and Nancy’s vocals. That’s what we wanted. And then we got to the point of the album, me and Lee [Kiernan] had recorded vocals, it was just crap. It wasn’t good for the chorus. And then we were with them, we were just like, “Do you know what? They seem like they’d be down, so let’s ask.” So we asked them and they did, they nailed it. It’s a beautiful thing.
That Re:SET tour was unusual, you were basically just playing weekends. Did you like having the free time?
Well, we filled our time. It was all still tying together that album, so then we had to go record James and Nancy, and we did side shows as well. But yeah, I tell you what, that tour was great. Because it was just the weekends. So it was kind of, three on, four off. We’re a six gig a week kind of band, normally. So it felt like pure luxury, if I’m being honest, being on that tour. And it was a great experience. It’s also interesting doing America in bite-sized quarters. Because normally what you’re doing when you’re touring America is, you’re spending six weeks traveling around. And so the slow dynamic change in your audience evolves as you move from state to state, and region to region. Whereas this was like West Coast, the South, East Coast, Midwest. They were really compartmentalized to those things. You really got a snapshot of those parts of America in pieces. It’s an interesting country here. It’s very interesting.
It sounds like a very civilized way to tour, if you can do it.
Everything LCD do is civilized. There’s no strain in their tour, and it’s great. It’s very catered towards everything always being great, performance wise. It’s focused on the performance. And we learned a lot about that. And you make a lot of concessions as an artist, especially when you’re on the up and coming like us, where you’re like, we just got to do everything we can, actually. So you say yes to everything, and it makes you react. It makes you exhausted. So yeah, it’s definitely the way forward. Whether or not financially that would make sense. I don’t know.
You start touring about two weeks after TANGK is released. Are you guys ready? Are you rehearsed?
Yeah. I’ll tell you what, I’ve spent longer working on TANGK live than I did on making TANGK. What we learned from playing CRAWLER live is, there’s something about an IDLES show where it has to be chaotic, and it has to be almost falling apart. But also we have to be very present in it. We have to be open to the exchange of energy that we have between ourselves and the audience. The last thing people want whenever they come to see an IDLES show, is me standing at a synth or a piano, just like twiddling knobs, standing still, freaking out because I’m catching loops, and I’m just like, focus, focus, focus. So it was really about how do we do this live without losing the IDLES thing? How do we keep it fun? How do we keep it exciting? It’s really just about focusing on all those things. And we’re there now. It’s great. And also, again, watching LCD Soundsystem every night taught us a lot. There’s no compromise, they’ve just worked everything out. So it’s a well-oiled machine, and everyone’s all playing their part. And there’s no star of the show. It’s just everyone’s got their bits to do. So that’s where we’re at with IDLES. Thank you LCD Soundsystem.
So your NYC tour stop is Forest Hills Stadium, where you played with LCD last summer. But this time you’re headlining.
Yeah. Big step. And it’s massive. And The Walkmen are supporting us. That is wild for us. I would say if you asked what IDLES’s favorite band is, it’s probably The Walkmen. So that’s a big deal for us. It is exciting. It’s terrifying as well. That’s far too big for us. We’ve played it before. It’s terrifying.
Shifting gears a little, in the video for “Gift Horse” you ride a mechanical bull. If I had to guess, to use an appropriate phrase here, I bet that that was not your first rodeo.
It actually was. It was my first rodeo. And it was terrifying. It was so exhausting as well. Have you ever ridden a mechanical bull?
Absolutely not.
It’s all about relaxing and letting your hips go, but if you forget to relax, it’s exhausting. So if you grip too hard, or if you try and grip on with your legs, it’s like… Most rodeos are over in seconds, but we’re filming a video, so there’s like take after take after take after take. It was good… the guy whose mechanical bull it was — a lovely guy — and he was giving me pointers and cues. There’s three settings, One, Two, and Three. And for the first, I don’t know how many takes, I was only getting Setting One, and then fell off as soon as he went to Two. Then we were getting up to Three and it was set. And then the director was like, “Do you know what? I don’t really like the padding that’s all over, it’s ruining the shot. Let’s get rid of the padding.” So I was on the mechanical bull while I was riding with nothing on the floor. It was terrifying.
They can’t “fix that in post”?
That’s what I thought! It was my first, and it’ll probably be my last rodeo. For a while anyway.
You’ve got a lot of experience riding atop crowds, though. Did that help anything?
Yeah, I think so, actually. I think it did. I know how to fall, so that helped. I knew if it was coming, I knew how to land on the right places, after years of being chucked on the floor and dropped by security and stuff like that. So I had that.
Would you recommend first time mechanical bull riders do it like you did — in a dress?
Again, no. No, that was a bad idea. Well, it was a dress that was like three or four sizes too small for me as well. So I was like… I couldn’t rip it, because then we wouldn’t be able to do the shot. So I was like… It was hard work. Cool dress though. It was a fun video.
You contributed to the Budgie x Lol Tolhurst x Jacknife Lee album, Los Angeles. Your song, “Uh Oh,” also featured Starcrawler’s Arrow Autumn de Wilde. How did you get involved with that?
That came about during lockdown. So I don’t know what your experience around lockdown was, but for me, you were just meeting each other on Zoom. So I had lots of meetings with other musicians and producers and stuff like that. And I had some good chats with Jacknife, and he was like, “Oh, we’re making this album with Budge and Lol, if you want to be on it.” And I was like, “Yeah, sick.” So yeah, that was recorded in a bedroom during lockdown. And it was cool. Actually, interestingly enough, those conversations really informed TANGK. Me and Jacknife were talking about various different kinds of techniques on distortion, and making stuff really… I don’t know what the word is, but organic and resonant and things. So conversations with Jacknife really got my head thinking in that mode, then that became TANGK. It was weird. That was at the start of lockdown. That was like 2020. It’s a long time ago. The finished product, it came out sick. I love the album. The James Murphy track is really great.
Yeah, I agree. Much like Joe, I think James doesn’t… Well I think Joe’s going to get a lot of credit for his singing voice this time, but I don’t think James gets enough credit for being as good a singer as he is.
Yeah, he’s great. He’s got amazing control, and he’s got an amazing falsetto. It’s so hard to sing like he does as well. Every night. He’s got a really, really… It sounds like it’s throat voice, but if it was, he would’ve stopped singing years ago, because that would’ve shredded it. That’s why my voice sounds like it sounds right now. I think he does not get enough credit actually as a great singer.
I also was wondering how you came to produce Florence’s cover of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” for the Yellowjackets soundtrack.
Basically, I found out that Florence was a fan, and she had a video of her preparing for tour, dancing, and it was to one of our songs. And I’m a fan of Florence. So we got in touch and we kind of hit it off, and we’re now great friends. And there’s a good chemistry between us in songwriting. So we’ve done a few… We’ve kind of tried and hashed out a few numbers together. And there’s good chemistry there. I enjoy her. Hopefully there’ll be further stuff in the future.
