Song of the Week delves into our favorite tracks each and every week. Find these and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist, and for our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, IDLES returns with the charged, liberating new single “Dancer,” which features LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang.
It begins with a classic descending string arpeggio, straight out of a late ’70s discotheque. Get ready to dance, the opening seems to say, but it is not the intro to a Donna Summer tune, nor Jamiroquai, nor Dua Lipa. Within a second, IDLES arrive for their spin on a dancefloor beat: swampy, spine-tingling, hypnotic, and always threatening to explode.
The aptly-named “Dancer” is the first single off IDLES’ upcoming fifth studio album TANGK, which arrives next February and features production from IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen, Nigel Godrich, and previous collaborator Kenny Beats. When we last encountered IDLES on their excellent 2021 LP Crawler, the British rockers found a way to refine their chaos into slow-burning industrial fires and weightless bliss, turning personal anguish into blistering catharsis.
Now, vocalist Joe Talbot claims that TANGK is moving away from the dark subjects of their previous work and focusing on something different: “I needed love,” he said in a statement. “So I made it. I gave love out to the world and it feels like magic. This is our album of gratitude and power. All love songs. All is love.”
Despite the euphoria that Talbot’s statement suggests, “Dancer” is not all smiles and rainbows. There’s tension packed in the spaces between beefy guitar plucks and Talbot’s carnal phrases, and when he spits the words “…and the sweat,” you might check your deodorant.
There’s something deeply primal about dancing, and particularly when doing it with a group of people. There can be a willful exchange of autonomy, and the potential for bacchanalian escalations. It can be fun, of course, but it can also be a messy, passionate, violent, incomprehensible moment. This is what IDLES zero in on in “Dancer” — Talbot offers dense, evocative imagery, announcing that his “focus is on the cocoa butter running down your neck” and savoring the mood of the hour, which tastes like “particles of punch drunk love.” Before launching into each chorus, Talbot provides his conditions: “I give myself to you/ As long as we move/ On the floor.”
If exploring the relationship between ecstasy and primal fear on the dancefloor sounds like the work of a familiar outfit, it’s certainly on purpose — this is an intersection that James Murphy and LCD Soundsytem know particularly well. After touring together on this year’s RE:Set Festival, IDLES recruited Murphy and Nancy Whang for the song’s chorus — they may sound dwarfed beneath Talbot’s roars, Bowen and Lee Kiernan’s droning guitars, and Jon Beavis’ pounding drums, but it comes across as an enchanting spell rather than mere backup vocals.
In fact, “Dancer” doesn’t totally feel like an ode to late night disco sessions, and it seems more tailored for the kinds of mosh pits that are mainstays at IDLES concerts. But even amidst the violence and chaos, as Talbot suggests, you can find love and adoration. It’s the moment when the flurry of activity around you and the touch of other bodies reminds you of your inner animal, your senses heightened, the energy of the moment consuming you. It feels dangerous and exhilarating — a perfect summation of what IDLES can conjure out of thin air. Being hip-to-hip and cheek-to-cheek has rarely sounded so visceral.
— Paolo Ragusa
Associate Editor