British rock band IDLES are set to make their highly anticipated return to Australia and New Zealand in 2025, in support of their new album TANGK. Having previously graced our shores at the 2023 Splendour In The Grass and with a sold-out 2022 AU/NZ tour, IDLES are no strangers to local audiences. Their 2025 tour will feature the band’s biggest headline shows yet, with performances scheduled in Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney.
The Everblack Podcast recently caught up with IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen to discuss their upcoming Australian tour in support of their latest album TANGK. They also delved into the band’s musical evolution, their performance at Dia de los Deftones, future plans, and more.
Watch/listen to the interview here:
TANGK is the righteous and vibrant fifth album from madcap truth-seekers, IDLES. Pronounced “tank” with a whiff of the “g” – an onomatopoeic reference to the lashing way the band imagined their guitars sounding that has since grown into a sigil for living in love – the record is the band’s most ambitious and striking work yet. Where IDLES were once set on taking the world’s piss, squaring off with strong jaws against the perennially entitled, and exercising personal trauma in real time, they have arrived in this new act to offer the fruits of such perseverance: love, joy, and indeed gratitude for the mere opportunity of existence.
A radical sense of defiant empowerment radiates from TANGK, co-produced by Nigel , IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen, and Kenny Beats. Despite his reputation as an incendiary post-punk sparkplug, frontman Joe Talbot sings almost all the feelings inside these 10 songs with hard-earned soul, offering each lusty vow or solidarity plea as a bona fide pop song—that is, a thing for everyone to pass around and share, communal anthems intended for overcoming our grievance. Lead single “Dancer” stands as the throbbing and scuzzy highlight at the album’s center – rattling bass and ricocheting guitar giving Talbot space to talk about sweat and sex on the dancefloor. (You will spy LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang here, too, singing.) It is lascivious and playful and positive, the ecstatic sound of at least a temporary fix. In the improvised hook, Talbot offers IDLES’ essential new mantra: “I give myself to you/As long as you move on the floor.”
He is singing about the rapture of a new relationship, but he is also singing about the special dynamic between IDLES and their fans, or IDLES and the world at large. This is a band’s vow to keep lifting and fighting for themselves and their listeners, to keep offering the grim persistence of joy and hope and love and wonder as long as that’s what anyone needs to survive. It is a love song the same way that TANGK is a love album—open to anyone who requires something to shout out loud in order to fend off any encroaching sense of the void, now or forever.
IDLES
AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND TOUR 2025
WITH SPECIAL GUESTS NATION OF LANGUAGE (AUS ONLY)
SHEPHERDS REIGN (AKL ONLY), VOIID (BRIS ONLY), ECCA VANDAL (SYD ONLY),
L☆UR☆ & THE HELL CUTZ (MEL ONLY)
Thursday, January 16: Town Hall, Auckland
Saturday January 18: Riverstage, Brisbane
Tuesday January 21: Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne
Wednesday January 22: Hordern Pavilion, Sydney
Tickets for all dates are on sale now.
For complete tour & ticket information, visit:
livenation.com.au & livenation.co.nz
