‘Grounds’: Idles’ tragically prescient look at the state of the nation
It was a song that introduced Idles fans to a brand new chapter. As if it were the scraps from Kanye West’s 2013 album Yeezus, ‘Grounds’ was a bold new experimental chapter for the band. The barking protest dog from previous albums had evolved into an articulate army bot, equipped to tackle the digital disillusionment of modern Britain.
The Bristol band may have conquered the mountain of industry success with their 2020 third album, Ultra Mono, but they weren’t willing to turn their back on the artistic values that got them there. In fact, they were ready to double down and in moments on the record, they were at their most scathing.
‘Model Village’ was a scatter-gun approach to politicism that would be viewed with clunkiness retrospectively, while ‘War’ may just be their finest sonic and lyrical effort to date. But on ‘Grounds’, they innovated and commented in equal measures. It was electronic diversion that marched the band further into the heart of egalitarianism with its driving rhythm and chorus line of ‘Do you hear that thunder?’.
When asked about the track’s sonic disposition, the band’s fearless leader Joe Talbot simply said, “A song that embodied self-belief, and gave us self-belief – a counter-punch to all the doubt we build up from all the noise we so easily let in.”
There’s a universality to that mission statement that welcomes all listeners with open arms, ensuring that, albeit brutally, the ideologies about to be shared are for all to listen to and for all to learn. Once the beating rhythm of the songs garners followers for its incitement of self-belief, Talbot’s vocals soon descend into something laser-focused.
In the second verse, Talbot sings, “Fee fee fi fi fo fo fum / I smell the blood of a million sons / A million daughters from a hundred thousand guns / Not taught by our teachers / On our curriculum”. A frank confrontation of a colonial past we are all complicit in, but one Idles are quick to highlight is being leveraged in these divided times.
“They don’t know what genocide happened to make the empire what it was,” Talbot said, when referencing a crowd of “make England great again” campaigners. He added: “And how important immigration is, and the National Health Service is, and socialism was as a construct in building our country, the welfare system, and looking after the poor”.
“We are now in a class war, and the poor are losing massively. I’m just fed up with England.”
The sonic composition of this lead single was strikingly different from anything they had previously released and would have undoubtedly drawn a more focused listen from fans and critics alike. For a band as politically engaged as Idles, the lyrical content of ‘Grounds’ was an important use of that space.
But the killer blow of the song’s sentimental intent is the marriage between its sonic palette and lyrical content. From the very first note of this sci-fi-coated thriller, a sense of immediacy makes itself known. Talbot understands that concept and rides it until the song’s close, compounding the critical idea that change happens on the ground, now.
