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Gone is the Husker Du-esque scrabble of Idlewild’s early bombshells; by contrast their self-titled tenth album sounds like a long-lost, grown-up cousin.
Back in the slightly frenzied and uncertain period that followed the demise of Britpop (a genre that unlike the dinosaurs avoided its own mass extinction event and laboured on for some time), Idlewild were enthusiastically received by the bored and waiting for the next thing music press.
From Edinburgh, and ironically it seemed named after a quiet meeting place in Anne of Green Gables, their chaotic early live shows and dissonant post hardcore had one pundit describe them as, ‘the sound of a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs’, whilst another opined that it was a noise like, ‘the Pixies taking Placebo up the back alley for light relief’.
Sooner or later however, turning it up to 11 every night becomes just another bone to chew on.
Over the three decades since forming – with at times the band off as well as on – its creative fulcrum has remained as singer Roddy Woomble, Rod Jones (guitar and backing vocals) and Colin Newton (drums).
Gone though is the Husker Du-esque scrabble of early bombshells like Captain, Satan Polaroid or Last Night I Missed All The Fireworks; by contrast their self-titled tenth album sounds like a long-lost, grown-up cousin to them.
Six years after the release of their last outing Interview Music, the Idlewild spread their recording sessions between Jones’ studio and the Island of Iona that Woomble now calls home.
The shared philosophy was simple: that each song would be strong enough to justify itself as a single in its own right, a tightness which means the ten songs amount to a complete running time just north of half an hour.
Whilst the desire to connect and be immediate is admirable, Idlewild have frequently scattered their lyrics around them like discarded, poetic philosophy, and that emotional dashboard blinks on and off once more.
Take for instance the juxtapositions of Like I Had Before, in form an off-the-leash, big tent rabble rouser but not far underneath complexity lurks like a sand bank with, ‘You learned what you could from a television/Theoretical criticism/Can give your life more context than before’.
Their obliques are sometimes surfaced, (I Can’t Help) Back Then You Found Me containing a reference to Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood; a song about considering the past without sentimentality, it’s also one of the most animated and episodic here.
It would, with a critical hat on, be easy to dismiss the Idlewild of 2025 as the kind of dinner party MOR offered up by the likes of Snow Patrol, but the rebuttal comes in the more abrasive surfaces of I Wish I Wrote It Down and Make It Happen, the latter the group’s nod to past influences such as Fugazi and Pavement.
If looking back hard is a trap, the smartly retro closer End With Sunrise at least makes the best of what would’ve sat comfortably on a Top Of The Pops presented by Janice Long.
But the idea of writing as a means to a forgotten end surfaces on I Wish I Wrote It Down, whilst the sometimes tortured highlight Permanent Colours cautions against waiting for something to happen which may never come.
Over time there’s a subtle effect which turns uncertainty from presenting as an open door to push through into a flight of stairs to be endlessly climbed.
Idlewild continue to find their own way, navigating between as Woomble puts it, ‘Big ideas, deep uncertainties and memorable tunes’.
Their flame is still lit.
