IDLES Lay Claim to the Dance Floor on Lead Single From New Album ‘TANGK’

Bristol’s IDLES have always been a band to smile with a mouthful of blood, but on their newly announced fifth album TANGK (Feb. 16, 2024, Partisan Records), previewed via lead single and video “DANCER” this week, the hard-nosed English rockers don’t just smile—they dance, too.

TANGK—“pronounced ‘tank’ with a whiff of the ‘g’ and an onomatopoeic reference to the lashing way the band imagined the guitars sounding that has grown into a sort of sigil for living in love,” according to a press release—finds IDLES reuniting with Kenny Beats (Denzel Curry, Vince Staples, Benee), who co-produced their Grammy-nominated 2021 album CRAWLER alongside the band’s own Mark Bowen. This time out, IDLES also enlisted none other than Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, The Smile, Beck), who helped send their gleefully blunt post-punk sound in a new direction. As heard on “DANCER,” TANGK retains the band’s swaggering brawn while letting its heart of gold beat louder than ever.

Released Wednesday alongside a cinematic music video (dir. Jocelyn Anquetil), “DANCER” finds IDLES wholeheartedly embracing dance-punk, down to the backing vocals by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang. Tense percussion and thrumming guitar and bass lend the instrumental an exhilarating energy, while frontman Joe Talbot playfully evokes dance’s physical communion via sensory detail and self-deprecating humor (“I’m poised / Like a goddamn ape”). Nowhere is the song’s sentiment more clear than in the improvised chorus: “I give myself to you / As long as you move on the floor.” The video reflects that same idea, as IDLES and various strangers dance their way to absolution.

Talbot said of the track in a statement, “’Dancer’ is the violence that comes from the pounding heart of the dancefloor and rushes through your body and gives you life from music, from love and from you.”

IDLES will close out 2023 with a pair of shows in Asia before returning for a European run in early 2024. You’ll find their complete tour itinerary down below, along with the details of TANGK, and ticket info here.

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