IDLES international tour 2024
March 12, 2024 – Rockhal, Luxembourg
The post-punk / post-hardcore, Grammy-nominated British band IDLES are extending their 2023 tour to support their fifth album Tangk, released last February – a mature and intense album, which has enriched and raised the level of the Bristol band’s repertoire, now capable of going well beyond purely post-punk labels.
Joe Talbot, with a gymnastics band on his head, jumps around, the wired microphone like a coiled snake, spits out words like glass, while the band builds a wall of sound that comes onto four thousand hearts ready to pogo, jump and thrill. Guitarist Lee Kiernan, after a couple of songs, is already stage diving.
These irreverent Bristol devils unleash pure visual and sonic power. They are restless, against any form of royal or divine imposition, as they recall in the fast-paced ‘I’m scum’, a manifesto of the marginalised, of that working class which, especially the early Idles, feel they can relate to.
In the two-hour concert there is also room for topics of relevance , with the shout ‘free Palestine’ launched several times. “Never Fight a Man with a Perm”, another of the band’s iconic singles, is a mass-jumping, collective ritual against toxic masculinity, which drowns out in the women’s dress worn by Mark Bowen, a tribute to Nirvana.
The closure can only be entrusted to ‘Rottweiler’, from the album ‘Joy as an Act of Resistance’, which once again gives back all the band’s dynamite power, unravelled in a long instrumental part.
That feeling of ‘dangerousness’ that runs through the whole concert is one of the great strengths of the band, which boasts fans of various ages because it is able to strike a chord with both the veterans of the genre and the younger generation.
Setlist
IDEA 01 – Colossus – Gift Horse – Mr. Motivator – Mother – Car Crash – I’m Scum – 1049 Gotho – The Wheel – Jungle – When the Lights Come on – Gratitude – Divide and Conquer – POP POP POP – Television – Roy – Samaritans – Grace – Crawl! – The Beachland Ballroom -Never Fight a Man With a Perm – Dancer – Danny Nedelko -Rottweiler
CHIARA ULZEGA 