Ultra Mono, the third studio album from IDLES, comes out September 25 from Partisan Records. I spoke with lead singer Joe Talbot over WhatsApp to discuss the album, its influences, love, therapy, and the political climate Ultra Mono will land in.
Brad: Thanks for taking the time to chat.
Joe Talbot: Of course, man. No worries. That’s what I’m here for, sadly.
Brad: I wanted to begin with the new sound on Ultra Mono, but thought I should start with the present moment. An American group in New York called the Music Workers Alliance recently called what’s going on an “extinction moment” for music, with thousands of musicians on unemployment benefits that might run out. Recently you all posted on social media asking for support from the UK government to save the music industry. How are you doing and how is IDLES trying to survive this moment?
Joe: Survive is a strong word for a band like IDLES. We’re doing fine. We’ve always been doing fine—us and bands at our level, in terms of size of audience. That’s the imperative in our equation. We can survive this quite easily by keeping up a rapport with our audience. They’re a loyal audience that we have. [IDLES’ online community has been lauded for its inclusivity and commitment to the group.] We’ve always had good merchandise and sold merchandise well, but it’s now a huge part of the band’s income. For us to have built a platform on which to sell merch easily—because the merch is indicative of part of our “branding,” if you want to look at it cynically—we can make money without touring, which is a huge, huge blessing.
Obviously streaming has been a huge part of the death of the uber-capitalist music industry, where you could make a product and sell it for what it’s actually worth, which is per song. It’s changed the worth of a song, which is easy to get a hold of, so monetarily it’s not worth much. As musicians, our live aspect was how we made our money; merchandise and live music. So [the pandemic is] taking away what is 60-70% of our income, to some people 100% of their income. So we could continue artistically, we kept up a dialogue with our audience, we gave them something to watch, something to look at, something to listen to. We’ve continued our dialogue, which is more of a monologue in terms of an experience of us, because we can’t play live. We’ve been fine, basically.
We were going to start an album campaign anyway, so we made sure it was more fluid, that there was more going out to our audience. It’s a busier campaign in terms of giving people more singles than we were going to before, letting them know when the singles are coming out, so that there’s less uncertainty there. Our point was: the last thing people need right now are more fucking surprises. We thought, “What nicer way to give them certainty than to tell them when the songs are coming out?” It gives fans something to look forward to and also gives them a sense of security in terms of what we’re doing. It felt like a nice exchange.
In terms of the industry in general? It’s capitalism, uber-capitalism at its most blatant. It means small independent companies collapse under the weight of quick access. Streaming, fast food: all that stuff is killing a sense of worth in product. Music is dying in terms of its commercial worth, because people are willing to take it duty-free and pay a giant corporation money instead of giving the band money. Which is why merchandise is a huge part of our language and something we won’t shy away from—Please buy our t-shirts—because that gives us fucking money. You’re not giving it to us by listening to our music, so can you help out somehow? [laughs] Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to make t-shirts and make my own clothing company before I started a band, so I was really excited about making our merchandise, but for a lot of people it’s not something they’re interested in, so it’s a bollock.
It's the same as loads of stuff. It’s the same reason New York, London, and Paris are dead. Because landlords have come in and abused everyone—monetarily speaking—and now that huge gap between the rich and the poor means that during times of extremity, like a pandemic, the people who come out of it the other side are the upper-middle classes, the people who are earning more. The working classes are fucked and the rich are much richer. It’s the same as always. If you’re anything but well off, you’re fucked in situations like this: in a recession, in a pandemic, in a war, anything like that. It’s the poor and the lower middle classes that suffer and the rich just get richer.
If you’re anything but well off, you’re fucked in situations like this: in a recession, in a pandemic, in a war, anything like that. It’s the poor and the lower middle classes that suffer and the rich just get richer.
We’re lucky that we’re on the other side of it and that we have money for merch and record sales, which is very rare these days. Isn’t that insane?
Brad: In your view, what has to change to resolve some of these structural issues in the longer term?
Joe: Do you want me to be honest?
Brad: Sure.
Joe: The only way it will change is through revolution; the only way revolution will happen is through death. The middle classes are way too comfortable to really make a change. It takes real devastation for a real financial and economic shift in our countries. As far as civil war is concerned, I’d say America is closer than anywhere else I know in terms of unrest and financial imbalance, no health care. Fucking scary shit. Many people are very democratically one-sided: the left despise the right, the right despises the left. The right is like confederate-flag waving, angry covid-19-denying, Trump-supporting, gun-waving—fucking… either severely working-class people or obscenely rich people that all have the same sort of racist, benign outlook on life. And then you have the middle-ground, the liberals on either side of the coast, who seem to be scared for your future.
In the UK, it’s the same. There are huge binary shifts now where the left are really left and the right are right. And most people are, you know, right-wing: they’re scared about their future and they’re voting for conservative government, for republicans. I think the only way any of this can really shift is for economic collapse. How can capitalism change otherwise? Do you honestly think that people will just turn around and say, “Actually 60% tax is a good idea, let’s stop funding arms companies and bombing brown people and let’s put it into schooling for the people that have been oppressed for the last 400 years”? You know? “The working classes of America, let’s educate them and give them free healthcare, put way more into taxes and change our defense program.” It needs heads rolling on the floor. Personally, I don’t see anything changing. I see language changing in populist newspapers and media outlets, to make the right scared of different groups depending on what they need people to be scared of.
Brad: In the US, the Left is partly stuck in a post-Bernie Sanders moment, where the opportunity for a radically different trajectory was quashed. The generational differences here are similar to how things are in the UK: most young people are voting Labour, most older folks are voting Tory; most of the young folks were voting for Sanders, most of the older Democrats were voting for Joe Biden. I see some of that reflected in the language on Ultra Mono: for instance, on “Reigns” [“How does it feel / to have shanked the working classes into dust?”] or “Carcinogenic,” where working 9-5 and Wall Street austerity are equally carcinogenic. That feels like a minor departure from the previous albums, where politics often appeared in stories of individuals or in parables. How have the last few years altered the politics of your music?
Joe: It hasn’t shifted at all really. I’m saying the same things I was saying 10 years ago. It’s just a reaction to Joy [As An Act of Resistance, IDLES’ last album],I guess, in terms of the way I was saying things.
I had a couple of criticisms about where I stood in terms of politics and I just wanted to squash that. I despise our government, I believe the working classes in our country are being butchered—ideologically, economically, structurally. Like, how are you going to expect a young working class person in this country to thrive when they have way less of an opportunity at the start, so much less than the middle classes only a few postcodes over? It doesn’t make sense to me that we’re a developed country and people are starving to death. Food banks are rife in this country, where churches usually let foodbanks use one of their rooms and give working class families food packages every week. You see working class families queuing up for food. In England. To me, that’s fucked, and I wanted to make that clear.
People expect me to be a certain way, and Joy As an Act of Resistance was supposed to be the start of a conversation: “Why are you so hateful and angry?” Let’s start with compassion and empathy. It was a political statement that nothing is going to change if you stand there and attack people, so let’s start with an open-ended, open-eared conversation. To put it bluntly to Americans: freedom of speech is not exercised by shouting. Freedom of speech is exercised by listening. That is the only way it will succeed: if you shut the fuck up and listen, so that someone has the freedom to speak. If you then decide that freedom of speech is that you get to shout, you’re not listening and no one else gets the freedom of speech. That’s basically what Joy was.
But the thing is that rock and roll music, unless you spell it out to people—and I do a lot of spelling it out—some people didn’t quite get my messaging. So this is the apex IDLES album. Ultra Mono is as IDLES as it will get. And if they don’t get it after that, fuck ‘em. I’m not here to apologize for my politics or explain my life away. These days, I’m working in a completely different guise and looking at the world in a completely different way so that I can have fun with my art and my politics. It’s not that it won’t be political, but it won’t work for everyone else’s pace all the time.
Brad: This links up with one of the things you’ve talked about in the past. A couple of years back you said you’re not a political band, that you don’t want to be the next Billy Bragg. Recently, however, on your show [Bally TV], you and [guitarist Mark] Bowen were talking about this with Billy, about being dismissed as a “political band,” or only a “political” band. Do you feel you’ve come to terms with that?
Joe: I have no qualms whatsoever. I had that issue post-Joy. I was battling with what all that meant. Now I don’t battle with that at all. I’m a musician, not a politician. I am only a window onto my own experience and hopefully a mirror onto others—or a mirror onto myself and window onto others. All I am is an artist, and I can only be as honest or as flamboyant or as expressive or as transparent as I want to be.
I’ve never lied once, so I don’t regret anything I’ve sang or anything I’d said or anything I’ve done as a musician. I’m just going to continue to put my shit out there into the world and experience the live shows as what they really are: a dialogue with audiences, who all have their own truths and their own experiences to give us. I stopped caring, properly. So what if some other half-assed shit band has got issues with how we express ourselves? It doesn’t fucking matter. I don’t listen to their music. That’s it. Ultra Monois momentary acceptance of the self. You sitting around worrying about what other people think of you is not accepting who you are. I worried about that before, and then I realized I could just be as an artist, it doesn’t have to all make sense to everyone.
The whole point of Joy was to try and have an open political chat: which means it isn’t just for left-leaning people, it’s for right as well. Hopefully there will be some Republican voters coming to an IDLES show in America and see the compassion and the passion of left-wing thinkers so that they can have a decent conversation with them. And maybe, in time, change their minds about who they vote for.
Then you get criticism, and you realize it doesn’t matter. It’s going to happen either way, so as long as you go in honest, with good intentions, or what you believe are good intentions, you’re never going to come out with regrets. Ultra Mono is that kind of acceptance and confidence, truly embracing what it is we are, which is five best mates who get to travel the world and play really good music really well.
Brad: Let’s talk about the music. I’ve been fortunate enough to listen to Ultra Mono a few times now and it’s really excellent. One of the goals you’ve spoken about in relation to the record is to make rock music that stands up sonically to hip hop. Bowen described “Grounds” as Kanye West writing an AC/DC song, “Danke” sounds a bit like Death Grips re-writing a Daniel Johnston song. Can you talk about the relationship with hip hop here, what Kenny Beats brought to the production, what the musical evolution from Joy was?
Joe: Well, Bowen got that wrong. The idea for “Grounds” is that I wanted for it to be AC/DC meets Pharoahe Monch and Dizzy Rascal. Kanye West didn’t come into that. That kind of early 2000s, big hip hop production, like “Simon Says” or M.O.P.’s “Ante Up.” That big anthemic hip hop of the early 2000s, Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life-kind of vibe.
It came from the concept of the album: every album starts with a title and the artwork, and then we build around it. “Ultra Mono” was a phrase that we invented that meant to be the ultimate truth of who you are, the momentary acceptance of the self. I thought about that loads and why it was important to me. I needed it, I needed to survive this point in my life by truly accepting who I was, good and bad—at least, what society would call good and bad. Bowen and I thought about that sonically and how it would translate. How can you translate wholeness and togetherness and self-acceptance and confidence? To try and sonically accept it: Ultra Mono is that.
“Ultra Mono” was a phrase that we invented that meant to be the ultimate truth of who you are, the momentary acceptance of the self.
The music that to me embodies that acceptance of the self is hip hop, that huge-sounding orchestral, Wagner-style, drr-drr-drr kind of thing, the whole fucking orchestra playing the same thing at the same time. It creates this sense of a big fuck-off military marching band on crack pushing forward and making something savage, which is what we wanted. The hip hop side is the confidence in the production, the orchestral stab that’s pulled out, written around a kick and a snare. The thing about hip hop and techno and grime is that there’s a sense of space between the beat. “Grounds” is the best example of that, where I have time to put my words out there. With rock and roll, often there’s five egos playing an instrument at the same time, which is why they don’t stand up sonically on the radio. Billie Eilish has just got subs, a kick, and one voice—you know, a tenor or higher—it’s easy to balance because it’s not loads of things going on at the same time. Whereas rock and roll music has loads of shit going on at the same time. We wanted to have that stripped back sonic approach that hip hop has to create maximum volume. Minimum ego creates maximum volume. We wanted to write songs that have two guitars doing the same thing with a kick and a snare to give that space so that my voice can be heard. That was our way of embodying what “Ultra Mono” meant. With every song written around one part, each has its one vocal point that we wrote around—anything that we wrote that didn’t fit didn’t go on. Each song has its own way of embodying “Ultra Mono.” For instance, “Reigns” is written as a techno song around a bassline.
Minimum ego creates maximum volume.
That was our concept: how do we get a wholeness and that huge sound you find in hip hop? Subs create the frequencies that you can’t get much of even with a bass guitar. Kenny Beats got in touch with me on Instagram and we started chatting, and it was just like perfect timing. He offered his services in a very Kenny Beats way, which was like “I fucking love you guys and I just want to get involved.” He’s very sincere and honest, he’s not full of shit like most producers, where they say they’ll do anything and then… He is on it and he really cares about certain music and has proven it time and time again by working his ass off and changing our record. He co-mixed every song on the album and gave it that Kenny Beats thing that we needed. So now I think we’ve got what sounds like a very full sounding whole record that we wanted at the start.
Brad: With the toning back, in some ways, of the instrumentation, how is this changing how you envision the live shows that will (hopefully) follow some day?
Joe: Live shows are very different from a record. There’s only so much sonic space you’ve got on a record before all the frequencies start clashing. In a room, it’s more about the parts and how you play it. If you’ve got an orchestra in a big reverberating room, and everyone’s playing different things, it’s going to sound cacophonous. But if you have everyone playing the same thing and give some space and time between each note, it’ll sound fucking huge, because there’s room there to hear all the instruments. Two speakers is twice as loud as one speaker—that’s kind of how sound works—so live we can just absolutely pummel people by playing the parts we’ve written around the idea of Ultra Mono.
But also we can add, instead of taking away. If you’ve got three snares on record, that wouldn’t be three times louder but three times harder to balance. Whereas live you can hit three snares and it’s just a snare that’s three times louder. Your ear isn’t trying to balance all the frequencies, it’s just there. So live, we’re just going to treat it like the five of us unified and smashing people up with the songs we’ve written. Hopefully by Album 4 we’ll have learned a lot from mixing and mastering this album in terms of writing the songs so they’re easier to balance.
Brad: I’ve seen two IDLES shows, first in Brooklyn and then later in Boston. The experience that fascinated me was the recreation of maybe a classic, punk mosh, but always within a framework, which I’ve heard you talk about, of creating a space of love and care. A song like “Ne Touche Pas Moi” on the new album even literally engages with that. I wondered if you could talk about the philosophy behind the live shows and what you’re hoping people can experience at concerts?
Joe: It really is as simple as: we’re not a punk band, we’re a rock and roll band from the late-2000-teens. We’ve learned from lots of different genres, we just happen to be white dudes with guitars, so it’s easy to throw us into the bandwidth of what rock and roll or punk means. That’s why I’m quick to say we’re not a punk band: it’s not because I don’t love punk music and I don’t stand behind a lot of its politics, but because it makes it very hard to explain to people that we don’t do everything that punk bands do. What I love about punk music is the togetherness and the inclusivity. What I don’t love is the macho bullshit, like [mocking a punk voice] “Yeaaa.”
What if someone wants to stand in the middle at the front and not get elbowed in the face? It’s still music, people are allowed to experience music however the fuck they want. It’s about reminding people that we are in a group of people, to create a safe arena to experience the music, and to experience themselves in a safe and fun way. It might encourage people to not just think about themselves and their own experience but think about their neighbors. It’s keeping people awake and aware of their surroundings. It’s not 1974, dude, it’s 2000 and 20—sadly.
What if someone wants to stand in the middle at the front and not get elbowed in the face?
To me, it’s obvious: we’re here to create an inclusive arena so that people can feel safe and comfortable to be themselves—at a rock and roll show, or a fucking hip hop show, whatever you want to call us. We’re none of those things. If you want to feel good at an IDLES show, just look after each other. Leave all that hardcore shit behind, leave all that punk behind, leave all that rock and roll crap behind, leave all that pop behind. I don’t want anyone taking selfies at our show, and I don’t want anyone elbowing someone else in the face. I want true beauty. Just be there and enjoy each other and enjoy yourselves. That’s not generic, that’s not from genre, that’s just who I am as a person and how I experience a rock and roll show.
It’s being aware of your surroundings and using the advantages and disadvantages of who you are and what you’re perceived as to make something beautiful. That’s also what quarantine is, what the covid-19 situation is. Ok, we can’t play live, so how can we use that to our advantage? Well, let’s use this downtime, this time where we’re home to write Album 4, something we weren’t going to be able to do for a year and a half. Let’s keep a more regular and open dialogue with our audience, something else we wouldn’t normally be doing on social media, because we fucking hate that stuff. But right now social media isn’t just a bag of dicks taking photos of themselves. It’s actually a great platform to help people feel less isolated and unsure than they have been.
That’s what we’ve always been about. When we started this band, we were very aware that the genre of music we were playing was dying on its ass. There’s nothing fucking cool about indie rock and roll at all! We just love playing it and we wanted to write something and make people feel something, feel part of something. We like using those disadvantages as part of our language.
Brad: Speaking of, you talked recently about “violence” being part of the artistic language of the band. Which is clear in a lot of ways, from lyrics to sound, but it also seems to partially contradict another impulse you’ve spoken about too: moving away from the violence and aggression of an earlier era, both for yourself and others. Can you talk more about what it means for violence to be part of the band’s artistic language.
Joe: Best way I can describe it is as an artistic tone to our music, to our performance live. It’s something that’s innately in all of us: there’s violence in love, there’s violence in language, there’s violence in color, there’s violence in taste. Something like… I don’t know: a hug can be a violent one, but a loving one. It’s an expression, it’s a form of passion. If you channel it in a beautiful and vibrant way, it’s purely artistic violence. I think that’s healthy, and it’s part of my therapy now.
I speak with my therapist once a week, and to pretend that everything’s fine and that I’m happy and I completely love myself is a waste of an hour. There is a dark side to my life and my subconscious and everything. But also: Jackson Pollack is violent. I want our music to cut through everything in life, and to be heard nowadays you have to really cut through it. I think the violent tone does, because it can change how people perceive violence. You can grieve violently, just look at images from around the world and you see women on their knees screaming in agony. That’s how I felt when my mom and daughter died, I just didn’t do it. I didn’t get on my knees and fucking scream and grab at the dirt. But that’s how people feel, so why not make your music and your art that way? That’s how love feels. It feels vibrant and violent. That’s how pain, grief, and self-loathing feels: it’s a fucking beast, so why pretend it’s not there? I want our music to sound like Caravaggio, I’m just not going to go out and stab someone like he did. That’s my therapy. My ethics are there, Caravaggio just didn’t have a good therapist.
Brad: The openness with which you’ve discussed therapy seems important. You’ve spoken not just about the influence of your therapy on the lyrics and writing of the music, but also about the concerts as having an almost therapeutic aspect. You present a version of yourself and allow others to recognize or misrecognize themselves in what they’re seeing. I’m curious if the role or place of therapy has shifted between Joy and Ultra Mono. How are you thinking about music and therapy, music as therapy?
Joe: The way I’ve chosen to use my lyrics is diegetic. Everything I write about is what’s going on in my life. There’s no flamboyance or invent-ory stuff. Everything I sing about and I’m talking about is how I feel, what I’m exploring in myself at that point. Brutalism was the start of my existential crisis, understanding that I was in trouble and that I needed help. That’s why it was so explosive, confused, and erratic—and almost maniacal in some songs. Because I was exactly that: I was a maniac. I was angry and violent. Nasty to people one minute and loving and ecstatic and wide-eyed and fucking loose. I wasn’t a well person, and I was starting to realize that I needed to stop in order to save my life. Brutalism was the start of me mending.
Joy as an Act of Resistance was me starting to go to therapy, to sober up, and, as everyone does, relapsing. But calling it a “relapse” instead of a “Tuesday morning”—that’s the difference. Five years ago, I just got up and had some cocaine for breakfast. Five years later, you’re calling going out and getting drunk a “relapse,” which is a healthy way of looking at it. It’s allowing you that breath to be forgiving, to say it’s cool, you’re not back to square one. It means this is an episode and there’s a reason you need to have that drink. Talk about it.
Who I was as a person was changing. I was allowing myself to feel angry, I was allowing myself to feel lost, and scared, sorry for myself at times, but always moving forward whilst feeling mindful about what I was thinking. Joy was about myself learning to have conversation. In order to really understand why you’re voting for someone, why you’re leaving someone, why you’re having that drink you need to understand your own motives. Those motives are deep rooted in things unsaid for decades. Therapy is about having those conversations with yourself and other people, caring conversations about how you truly feel.
That’s what Joy was: alright, our country’s fucked, let’s talk about it. Why are you so angry? Why are you voting for the conservative government for the first time in 50 years when it’s that same government that took your job away and turned your village into a fucking graveyard? That’s what happened within me. Some were turning into racist maniacs, but I was mending, and I wanted to have that conversation to get better.
Why are you so angry? Why are you voting for the conservative government for the first time in 50 years when it’s that same government that took your job away and turned your village into a fucking graveyard?
Joy was the start of a conversation. And then after that, what happens when you open up is you get reactions, and then you have to think about those reactions. Not everyone is going to turn around when you tell them you’re an alcoholic and say, “Oh my god, you’re so brave!” Some people are going to say, “I know, now can you fuck off please?” Because you’ve let them down a whole bunch of times. You don’t go to a pub and say “Hey man, let’s sit down and talk about this.” They’re going to put a glass to your face. The reality of life is not everyone wants to have those kinds of conversations.
Loads of people who are left-voting turned around and did the knowing critique of our album, saying it’s just nursery rhymes for champagne socialists. Yeah, we know dick-head. That’s why we’re doing it. The whole point of the album is to be naïve and vulnerable. Let’s start again. I happen to love what immigrants have done for our country. I don’t understand why you’re an angry cunt, but I’m willing to learn because rather that than being put in a hospital or prison.
A lot of people feel they can bash our album. “They’re just sloganeering.” Ultra Mono was: I get it, I’m not a moron. I’m not trying to patronize anyone. Those pseudo-intellectual journalists who try to criticize our music as simplistic or optimistic… It’s supposed to be simple and optimistic! It’s either that or you just sit around writing complex notes and essays about how fucked our planet is. I did that for my degree, now I want to talk on a humanistic level. I wanted to react to the reactions really. That’s what I can do, is be diegetic to my current situation. So Ultra Mono is: therapy is working, and I’m trying to figure out what I want from life and what kind of person I truly am. I’ve got the confidence to say, “You don’t like our music? Go fuck yourself, don’t listen.” What have you done this year? Written a ton of reviews? It’s just a bunch of half-assed critics in the basement of their mother’s house. I’m fully happy to listen to people’s critique of my ethics, my political beliefs. But to just sit there and deal with these little worries about what people think about our music. No: we’re good, I know we’re good. I like us, that’s all I need. Ultra Mono is about elimination of worry by not thinking about anyone else, just accepting who I am.
I know I ramble a lot, I just had a coffee. You got me while I’m in first gear, unfortunately.
Brad: It’s better than stalled.
Joe: I wouldn’t have answered stalled.
Brad: One other question I wanted to ask about: connected to and in some ways the opposite of the theme of violence is the theme of love. There’s an interesting juxtaposition of “I wanna be loved / Everybody does” on “A Hymn” and the Daniel Johnston line, “True love will find you in the end” on “Danke.” What work is love doing for you on this record? What is the relation between love and violence?
Joe: I had to really realign what “love” meant to me. It’s not romantic love—I haven’t got space for that. Love is something innate. It’s about loving yourself so you can really understand what your role is as a person and what you can do for the world. Love is waking up in the morning and thinking about that song you’ve thought about for the last few weeks. Love is forgiving someone for being an asshole for five years.
Love is not a quiet word, it’s a big fucking ox.
That empathetic love is innate in all of us, I just think it’s hidden from years of being bashed by life, circumstances, other people. Romantic love is not of interest, to be honest, right now. It’s more about the humanist love, empathy, reminding yourself as much as possible to be kind to yourself. Especially when other people are bashing you all the time—and I don’t mean criticisms of our albums or any of that shit. And violence? The more bullets you get hit with, the tougher your Kevlar needs to be. Love has to be tough, it has to be violent, has to be big to cut through that stuff, to block yourself from all that, your soul. I don’t think love is a joke. I don’t think empathy is a joke. I don’t think it’s something weak, I don’t think it’s meek at all. I think it’s bright, fucking—I don’t know. It’s not anything meek. Love is not a quiet word, it’s a big fucking ox. That’s how it aligns with violence. Love is all over this album, it’s all over our stuff. I heard this cool thing, yesterday maybe, that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. And it’s so true: things can suddenly turn to hate so easily, things that you love, because passion is the fuel behind it. And all that energy of hate that’s going on in the world, you need all that energy of love. Our album is the opposite of indifference. That’s for sure.
Brad: Love is connected to care, care as an active practice.
Joe: It has to be active. You have to remind yourself of the proactive nature of love, and empathy is not an easy pill to swallow sometimes. To try to empathize with your adversary after they’ve just fucking told the world what a piece of shit you are. It’s not easy to do, but you do it anyway. I’m not making out as fucking Gandhi, I’ve still got a knuckleduster—brass knuckles as you call it—but I don’t want to have to use it. I want to use my songs. Love is more powerful than fucking fighting.
Brad: Along with love, we have the repetition of “Unity.” There’s a very clear lyrical through-line between Joy and Ultra Mono with the “He’s made of you, he’s made of me / Unity” in “Danny Nedelko” and the inversion, in “Grounds,” with “I am I / Unify.” A similar kind of universalizing call to unity. I can’t help thinking of the protests against police brutality here, which have been so huge and beautiful, to see people coming out of their houses or apartments spontaneously to march for hours, to set up communities as they have in New York or Seattle. This call for unity really resonates with me in this moment. How are you responding to the ongoing protests, what’s happening in the UK as well? How is that interfacing with what you’ve thought of race and masculinity?
Joe: It’s a long narrative, isn’t it? I’m fully aware that our platform means what we say is heard by a lot of people. Hopefully of different kind of backgrounds and races and such. But my intentions have always been to unite people in a sense of empathy and love and compassion. That’s what left-wing politics is all about. That’s why it often never works and is very slow paced. Because a manifesto of left-wing politics—without going into communism—is that you need to understand and empathize with your adversaries and come up with a plan that means everyone’s interests and welfare are taken into account and democratically put into place. Which means a long process of including everyone’s opinions and wants and needs. [Brief connection loss]
My intentions have always been to unite people in a sense of empathy and love and compassion. That’s what left-wing politics is all about.
I guess nothing’s changed for me. It’s a kind of healthy coincidence that I’m singing about unity in a time where people are unifying against oppressive organizations, racist organizations, and uber-capitalist monetized armies that are basically there to police the people into corners and [tell them to] shut the fuck up. The only thing you’re missing is a fucking royal family and then you are back to the 1600s, my friend.
It’s good that people are uniting against oppression, but it’s a continuing conversation and it’s not going to stop soon. It just so happens that people have had the time and the comfort of their laptops to kind of continue the conversation. And don’t get me wrong: the younger generations are inspirational and amazing, and I’m glad people have had this time to really consider what privilege means, what passive racism means, and all sorts of things that we’ve been talking about for a long time. It’s great people are more aware of it. Long may it continue.
But our music is a tiny speck in that, we’re not creating the human experience, we’re not going to change anyone’s life, or save anyone’s life. We have to be part of the conversation and inspire people to continue to have that conversation and create an arena for empathy and love, but it’s very unlikely to do much more than that. It’s just encourage people to think with an open mind and an open heart, vote with an open mind and an open heart.
I don’t know. My opinion hasn’t changed because of George Floyd’s murder and the ramifications of that. There is still so much room for groups to be heard when it comes to civil unrest and the complete brutality of the state. Militarized police—in some states, they have tanks, actual tanks, it’s fucking insane! In the UK, do you know what I mean, you wouldn’t see that. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a rifle, and there’s plenty of farms where I grew up.
Brad: We’ve had decades of military weapons of war being funneled back into our police departments and being used to suppress protests. It’s quite something.
Joe: It is quite something. I can’t cast aspersions on something I don’t understand. I’m not under duress of a fucking assault rifle, but it’s cool the conversation is opening up. More people are questioning your 2nd Amendment. “Do people really need to be carrying around guns these days?” I just know it was a positive way where people are having an open conversation about their white privilege, their class privilege, their heterosexual privilege, their male privilege. The next thing you know everything changes. Each day is a start. It’s a start all the time, and I just want to be part of that with my actions. My words are only so much.