Audioxide

IDLES’ most considered, sonically thoughtful, and complex release to date, taking the band down a new path while preserving their strengths.

Each note of every individual performance is captured and presented perfectly, with the ragged spirit of the band left intact. It’s scruffy yet masterful.

Ellie Rowsell’s drift between spoken-word musings and operatic soarings is alive and well, and the band as a whole is as simpatico as ever - if not moreso.

A rock record produced like a dance record, with endless amounts of saturation and compression applied to, well, everything. This is a failed experiment.

The record listens like an all-night jam at an impossibly cool bohemian gettogether. It’s funky, relaxed, audacious, exhausting... but above all, it’s brilliant.

There is a huge amount of musical and lyrical ingenuity to enjoy here, with strong messages, jovial piss takes, and Joe Talbot as the megaphoned town crier.

Dead Kennedys' iconic debut still boasts some of the most brilliant and uncompromisingly cynical songs that punk has ever seen.

Joy as an Act of Resistance is refreshingly sincere and positive in a time where artists are finding it easy to sensationalise and despair.

There’s a mindlessness to the instrumentation, lyricism, and vocals that is devoid of surprises. The 32-minute runtime blasts by as a blur of repetitive noise.

There is a remarkable confidence to the record that you wouldn’t usually expect from a debut, which is a testament to Costello’s immense musical capabilities.