This is a series of posts about the vinyl I own. It’s important to own music, rather than rely on streaming companies. It supports artists directly and you also get to have a cool thing you can touch, look at, show off.

I bought this album over Christmas (2025). I’ve loved IDLES for years, constantly amazed by their live shows, and it felt right to pick this up to add to the collection.

A Brief Introduction

IDLES are a British punk band formed in Bristol in 2009, emerging from the city’s DIY scene with a sound rooted in post-punk, hardcore, and noise rock.

At some point along the way me and my friends heard some demos and in my years as a music promoter I gave them their first ever live show in Manchester (as support act, at The Castle Hotel).

After several years of touring and lineup changes, they broke through with their debut album Brutalism in 2017. The record was confrontational and deeply personal, tackling class, addiction, grief, mental health, and political disillusionment in post-austerity Britain.

Following extensive touring and growing critical acclaim, IDLES released their second album Joy as an Act of Resistance in 2018.

Joy as an Act of Resistance.

Colossus is a stomping opener that you feel coming over the hill while you stand in the road and wait for the album to run you over. Which it does, in the best way possible.

You look like a Topship tyrant / Even your haircut’s violent

Never Fight a Man with a Perm sees them career over the hill and pick up speed. On Scum and Danny Nedelko you really sense both the joy and the resistance in the album title. This album came out in 2018, two years after Brexit and with the Tories in full swing and public discourse at a low. I don’t think we anticipated how low things would get over the next few years.

Fear leads to panic / Panic leads to pain / Pain leads to anger / Anger leads to hate

For some this came across as sixth form performative politics, but I found it a revelation which put forward arguments and hope in the face of Farage and his slug trail of hate. In Samaritans they take on toxic masculinity and again, it could be that the lyrics are too on the nose, but the music is what drags it through to the other side of respectable where maybe they don’t manage it on tracks like Gram Rock (the weak point on the album).

It ends with Rottweiler, which if I continue my analogy of the album being a car careering down a hill, is the point where everything strains and begins to wobble and fall apart. You can hear the band playing at the limit before it all starts to crumble into nothing.

Listening back you can see how this album launched IDLES into the mainstream. This album blasts you out of bed and onto the streets. Resistance is needed more and more all over the world, and so is joy. This album is still relevant. It still bangs.