The new track “Car Crash” “sees the band operating free from constraints and unshackled from any notions of what an IDLES song should sound like“. It showcases frontman Joe Talbot’s own near-fatal experience behind the wheel. “It’s the horrific, comedown hangover — waking up in the morning and realising the smashes, like, what the fuck am I doing with my life?” he said in a statement.

The video that accompanies the song has been created by Matthew Cusick and edited by Idles Lee Klernan. The project began in 2001 when “Cusick took a break from painting and began digitally cataloguing car chase scenes from 20th-century American cinema as an extension of his paintings and map collages. Appropriating footage from as early as the Keystone Cops, Cusick assembled “File on Motor Transgression, 2001-2011” by condensing more than 500 car chases into a navigation of the American landscape throughout cinematic history”.  

On collaborating with the band, Cusick said: “It is a gut wrenching, symbiotic conclusion to the piece. It has now what it was always missing… a killer soundtrack“.

Co-producer and guitarist Mark Bowen added: “We wanted it to be as violent as possible to reflect that event. I really wanted it to be this sonic touchstone. We recorded the drums beforehand and put them on a vinyl acetate. Whenever you replay an acetate, because it is kind of like a liquid, it degrades every time. It touches on things being transient and momentary — even a single drum hit. It’s like a memory, when the moment has passed and you deal with the repercussions over and over again, and they morph and change into something else. It’s one of the first times on an IDLES song where we used proper effects on the vocals — it was Joe going through my pedal board, so you get both clarity and degradation”. You can watch the video below.

Last night Idles appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! performing the latest single “The Beachland Ballroom”, making their U.S late-night TV debut. “It’s the most important song on the album, really,” said Talbot.

“There’s so many bands that go through the small rooms and dream of making it into the big rooms. Being able to write a soul tune like this made me go, fuck — we’re at a place where we’re actually allowed to go to these big rooms and be creative and not just go through the motions and really appreciate what we’ve got. The song is an allegory of feeling lost and getting through it. It’s one that I really love singing.” Watch Idles performing below.

Idles new album Crawler can be pre-ordered here. The band also starts a UK tour next year, more info about the dates and venues can be found in the latest mxdwn article.

Photo credit: Press/Tom Ham

The release of Arlo Parks’ ‘Collapsed in Sunbeams,’ on the 29th of January was a good day for British music, with this and another debut album from a brilliant young artist from the UK, Celeste’s ‘Not Your Muse,’ was a double whammy for fans of both singers who are each equally brilliant in their own right. Arlo Parks’ album is a unique blend of Indie, RnB and Spoken Work and cuts a solitary path across the map of British music, infinitely fresh and revitalising. Tracks like ‘Hurt,’ especially have great radio playability with the catchy hook line and laid back beat. The album also features ‘Caroline,’ which has already become a cult favourite when it was released in 2020 and has been making the rounds on radio and streaming mediums.

Arlo Parks is another rising star on the increasing exciting British music scene which is producing a great many talented women at the moment, from Dua Lipa to Celeste it is certainly a great time to be a British woman in music and it is surely long overdue in an industry which has been almost completely male dominated here for a long time. An appearance on Jimmy Kimmel is surely a good sign and an indication that ‘Collapsed in Sunbeams,’ is  bound to break the American market, a mark of success for British artists ever since The Beatles and other British Invasion bands managed it in the 1960s.

Arlo Parks is known for her friendship with Oxford Indie band Glass Animals and supported them for their live-streamed concert in support of their 2020 album ‘Dreamland.’ While releasing an album in 2020 was surely the most challenging experience for any musicians in recent memory, Arlo Parks features a less damning but equally challenging situation in 2021. While the doom and gloom of 2020 was defined by a lack of knowing what the future might hold or when the current situation may begin to change, 2021 does offer hope of a way out, yet the present situation is in fact in many ways more challenging and more deadly than last year.

Arlo Parks, like everyone in the music industry, has a mountain to climb in 2021 to keep the effects of the coronavirus crisis at bay, as we hope that situation gradually begins to draw to a close. While the health emergency may now have a tentative end in sight, the economic crisis which is yet to be truly felt will be hurting for many years, and musicians have a heavy load to carry.