IDLES Comes to the Kings Theatre This Week

Kings Theatre will welcome British rock band IDLES to Brooklyn on September 15th, 2022 at 8PM (doors at 6:30PM) in support of their critically acclaimed 2021 album CRAWLER. Tickets are on sale now at https://www.kingstheatre.com/calendar/idles/.

Late one night from the driver's seat of his car, IDLES frontman Joe Talbot watched a motorcyclist race past him on the highway at nearly 130 miles an hour. The rider was inches away from crashing into Talbot's car. In that singular moment, with the fragility of life and death so blatantly on display, Talbot began to reflect on his own trajectory and chronicle the formative moments therein, both literally and metaphorically.

"I've been a car crash." he says. "Being an addict is part and parcel of who I was for years and years. Watching that motorcyclist felt like the start of a new story -- reflecting on addiction in a forgiving, empathetic and sympathetic way. Allowing yourself the room to breathe and forgive, but also taking responsibility for your actions."

These forks in the proverbial road of life, and the consequences of choosing which way to turn, form the narrative backbone of CRAWLER, the fourth IDLES album in as many years and the follow-up to 2020's "Ultra Mono," the U.K. band's first No. 1 album. If "Ultra Mono" was, in the words of guitarist Mark Bowen, "kind of like a caricature of our identity that helped us see it for all its flaws," CRAWLER is an album of reflection and healing amid a worldwide pandemic that stretched the planet's collective mental and physical health to the breaking point.

For Talbot, CRAWLER is like the character of me in the dark warmth of my addiction - a crawler, a night crawler, someone on their knees, someone praying, someone surviving. The grit of it. The weight of the world on you. All of those things is a 'crawler.'"

Indeed, on CRAWLER, those stories run the gamut from literal car crashes (the dark, tense opener "MTT 420 RR," "Car Crash") and dancing with random Spanish men in futile late-night attempts to keep the party going at the club ("When the Lights Come On"), to aspirational tales of working hard, setting goals and seeing them through to fruition, no matter how insurmountable they may seem ("Crawl!," "The Beachland Ballroom," an honest-to-goodness soul song featuring a gorgeous, gripping vocal performance from Talbot).