Idles - Crawler

We have been champions of Idles pretty much since our inception here on Riot Act, giving high praise in particular to the way they've managed to inadvertently infiltrate the mainstream without compromising on their ideals, sound or vision. Despite that however, we will admit to being slightly hesitant towards 2020's Ultra Mono. Not a bad album by any stretch (and let's not forget, a record that saw them reach #1 on the UK albums charts) but in our estimation, it didn't bring all the much to the Idles party that we'd not previously heard on breakthrough album Joy as an Act of Resistance or their 2017 debut Brutalism. Fourth album Crawler then, has a fair bit riding on it; do the band continue to stomp forward with more boisterous noisy compositions, or do they try and polish themselves into a more mainstream proposition? Interestingly they might well of done neither of those things ... but, is it any good? https://youtu.be/t7aktt5cDqs (The Beachland Ballroom Video) https://youtu.be/Cw7jOq0op5E (Car Crash Video) https://www.idlesband.com/shop/ (Buy Crawler and other Idles merch) This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy