Wiki
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Release Date
31 August 2018
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Length
12 tracks
Joy as an Act of Resistance is the second studio album by British rock band Idles, released on 31 August 2018 by Partisan Records. The album peaked at number 5 on the UK Albums Chart on 7 September 2018.
The band started recording the album in 2017. Singer Joe Talbot stated "This album is an attempt to be vulnerable to our audience and to encourage vulnerability; a brave naked smile in this shitty new world". According to Talbot "lots of songs got scrapped because there was this pressure, which we were carrying but not talking about. We were trying to sustain the success of Brutalism, to basically remake it. So we kind of scrapped all the songs and talked about why we weren't enjoying writing it".
The album was produced by Space and mixed by Adam Greenspan and Nick Launay. The album's cover art features a photograph of a fight at a wedding in 1968 that Talbot saw on Instagram. The title phrase is similar to the title of the 2008 poem, "Joy Is An Act of Resistance" (part of a series of poems called "The Telly Cycle") by Pushcart Prize-winning poet Toi Derricotte, whose work as a Black woman explores race and identity. The album's lyrics deal with toxic masculinity, love, self-love, immigration, Brexit, and class. June deals with the death in childbirth of Talbot's daughter Agatha. It also includes a cover version of the Solomon Burke hit Cry To Me.
Jordan Bassett, reviewing the album for NME, awarded the album five stars, calling it "an instant classic". Dave Simpson, for The Guardian gave it four stars, describing it as "11 songs of focused, cathartic rage, rooted in their own experiences", and calling Idles "Britain’s most necessary band". Mark Beaumont of The Independent also gave it four stars. Dom Gourlay, for Drowned in Sound, called it "one of 2018's most eagerly anticipated releases", awarding it a score of 9 out of 10, and going on to say that it is "everything anyone could have wanted or expected it to be: Idles have released the most relevant and at times gut wrenching album of the year". Classic Rock magazine gave it the same score, calling it "a heart-breaking but jubilant exploration of joy, honesty, fragility and expression as our most powerful means of human resistance".
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