IDLES INTERVIEW: An Afternoon Eating Ramen

We caught Idles in New York right before their second sold out show at Terminal 5. They made it a point to head to Ivan Raman in the Lower East Side of New York and ordered practically 2 of the entire men to celebrate the latest album Crawler that came out this week.

IDLES INTERVIEW

Photographers // Deandre Mitchel & Shane Allen

Is Raman the preferred, cuisine on tour?

Joe Talbut: No, it used to be, but fuck. It slowed me right down that day.

You guys ordered 2 of the whole menu.

J: Yeah, yeah we did. But you gotta treat yourselves every once in a while, you know what I mean? It’s alright we have a green smoothie every morning.

Congrats on the new album. Time flew so fast I feel like I was still enjoying Ultra Mono.

Mark Bown: It wasn’t certainly wasn’t our intention to write an album as quickly. We were expecting to be touring from Ultra Mono for two years,

We’re very lucky and to show our gratitude we had to work as hard as we could within, The best way of doing that was to write and record a new album.

J: We were surrounded by loads of fucking awful stories where people we love, We know how lucky we were. So we decided to put our heads down and progress.

We were always going to burn the caricature of what we built with our audience in order to challenge ourselves and grow as artists.

What does the title, Crawler, mean to you?

JT: A lot of things really. Just as a word, I found it fascinating. Nightcrawler, bar crawler, crawling on your knees, praying, working hard, begging. Just getting out of the wreckage, wherever it is, These ideas all lean towards different episodes of my life that I’ve been in, over the last 20 years. I loved it, as a perspective thing is important that people see there’s a plurality to it.

Certain people will see people like me, who are on their knees and they’ll judge. Other people offer help and other people listen.

There are so many ways to react to someone who’s a crawler, someone coming from recovery and just trying to survive.

It’s definitely my story. It’s a narrative arc from when my mom first got ill to basically now. I’d been sober a year and a half at that point. I was in a really good spark where I was going on walks three or four hours a day, getting up at six every morning. I was going to therapy once a week and learning to be a parent.

There’s a lot of reflection that goes into that.

How has learning how to be a father been for you?

JT: I think parenting is two things, it’s almost like a professional relationship where someone’s life is in your hands, you know? There’s a lot of practices that you have to be good at to bring your child up properly. But it’s also a personal relationship between three individuals with three very different personalities.

That’s not easy when one of which, is very vulnerable and learning the whole time like fucking sponge. So it’s a delicate operation. No, one’s going to do it perfectly. No one, No one fucking knows how to parent properly because there is no one way.

Everyone’s idiosyncrasies are as important as each other, but that includes the parents as well.

They’re individuals as well, and they’re growing and they’re learning all the time. But there are definitely some parents who are worse than others. You’re never going to do it right all the time, just be open and kind.

There’s a bunch of references to automobiles, car imagery. What’s the significance of traveling and cars in relation to your life?

JT: The idea of Crawler came when I was in transit and I was thinking of this car crash, a motor bike pulled up beside me.

Just thinking of the fragility of it

And just how dangerous these machines are and in the wrong hands. But I look at the nice soft car that we were in and just how vulnerable and dangerous that is.

The allegory of motion is progress and moving forward. Car crashes are trauma.

I like the idea of, at times I was like this stunt man… a really bad one.,with no real sense of self-respect. Living dangerously a lot. I liked the poetry of it by the allegory of speed, the machine, the crash, and all the things around it just kind of clicked into place.

Was that what you wanted to sound like? A big car crash?

MB: Yeah, definitely. I think Car Crash was one of the first titles, it was written on the wall in our room.

Yeah. It’s always been like that. I mean, one of our earliest t-shirts as a band was a violent image of a car crash. I think the violence of that imagery is something we’ve always kind of tried to employ in our music,

We use that violence as catharsis,

Have you ever seen a car crash? I’ve seen one in my life and it was bad. Somebody on a sports bike they tried to beat a red light and they ended up T-boneing a minivan. and they died on the spot.

Fuck yeah exactly. We were in Asheville.a car get T-boned and smashed up on its roof, like literally two weeks ago.

Do you think the goals you had as a band when you guys started the band are the same as the ones you have today?

We’ve always said we’d like two things to always seek to improve in our craft, both live and on record.