Idles – Ultra Mono – VINYL LP

Description

ULTRA MONO

Momentary acceptance of the self.

We aim for our music to be a window onto us and a mirror onto you, a form of truth or transparency. At the eye of the storm of our last album and at the start of writing Ultra Mono there was a sense of losing that truth. All the reviews, positive or not, were pushing me further and further away from myself. I began assessing myself by what I had created and not who I was. This lead to our new writing becoming too self-aware: a mirror onto us and a window onto you. This is us eating ourselves to please the audience in order to be loved; bullshit and the exact thing we started the band to question, antagonise and defeat.

We wrote every song around one part and that part was the main focus of the rest of the song, no more. We all had to write what was best for that part. That focus on the individual part helped us think momentarily and not detach ourselves and just write in the moment for the moment. Ultra Mono is unification of all that we are and love in a moment. Ultra Mono is an engine of the self. Ultra Mono is a momentary artefact of us being. We are derivative, we are everything we love and that is beautiful. Don’t like it, don’t listen. We are naive. We are sloganeering. We are not what you think we are. Ultra Mono is the engine of what we are, now.

Each song soon became a battering ram of I. The album is a big fuck off ox that carries us through the sludge and doubt and back-handed fuckery, delivering us to all that we love: us/we/you.

Ultra Mono is “I am I” and the over the past few years we have come to understand that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves. Our audiences have grown and come from a sense of not belonging, building into a huge congregation of people that are making each other belong. That is magic. We are not magicians. We are you. You are magic. We are all just specks in an unimaginable mass of nothing but together we swallow that vastness of forever and become now.

We asked people to contribute to Ultra Mono as “features”. We asked them because we can now ask the people we love and admire to work with us, so we did and it is a beautiful privilege. Ultra Mono is a “yes” to what we love. Ultra Mono is the act of union and union in action. Ultra Mono bangs to the beat of unity, of our community that you built and it’s a beautiful fucking beast.

Ultra Mono is the acceptance of now and I and you. We are not the same but behold something together that is true: the moment. I can not control anything but my ideas, my actions and my emotions, I can not control your’s. In allowing our art to be momentary, we give ourselves and you the opportunity to perceive who we all are now as truth. It is an engine of all that we can’t control; our race, our age, our class and our past in the form of what we control absolutely our music, our now.

Joy is still an act of resistance. No more apologies. We will work hard and work honestly. Ultra Mono is joy’s engine and it goes.

We hope that you feel a sense of strength and purpose from listening to Ultra Mono. It is meant to fill you with the violence love and the rhythm of now. You are now. You are all.

All is love.