Given the frankly startling ascension of Employed To Serve over the last year or so, the even bigger impact can be seen on Holy Roar Records, with the quintessential name for delivering the heavy music’s most exciting new acts, now with more eyes on it than ever before. So enter Idylls, the Brisbane mob whose sophomore album ‘Prayer For Terrene’ was the sort of frantic, bloodthirsty hardcore that is seldom on the receiving end of critical acclaim (besides notable exceptions), but showed a band that definitely had something stirring within them.
And right from the off, ‘The Barn’ is yet another example of hardcore embracing an ethos that’s forward-thinking without any sort of compromise whatsoever. Make no mistake, this is certainly not an album for everyone – see the torrent of no-wave fury that ‘Muck And Vulnerability’ descends into, or the squealing avant-garde saxophone on ‘No Virility’ and ‘Neuroqueering On Shift’ – but when it clicks, this is an example of hardcore at its most feral and brilliantly creative.
Idylls certainly aren’t a band constrained by genre tropes, and they use it to their advantage here. While the searing, buzzsaw guitars and pummeling drums may be prerequisites for hardcore, there are far more interesting instrumentals that flesh it out. Like the spasmodic guitar work on ‘Maslow’s Dogs’, the aforementioned saxophone that pops up multiple times that brings in some John Zorn-esque madness to complement their own, and pretty much the entirely of closing track ‘In The Barn’. The track spends its nine-and-a-half minutes transitioning between creeping bass passages and eruptions of noise in one of the most fascinating examples of dissonance put to record in some time.
If that’s not a certainty that ‘The Barn’ won’t be for everyone, then nothing is. At least where Employed To Serve had the tiniest shred of wider appeal, Idylls occupy that angular half-step just away from real acceptance. But really, this deserves a lot of time, a truly mesmerising album that frequently delivers in terms of both experimentation and feral intent. The bar has already been raised so high for hardcore in 2017, and ‘The Barn’ only wants to nudge it up even further.
4/5
‘The Barn’ by Idylls is out now on Holy Roar Records.
Idylls links: Facebook|Bandcamp
Words by Luke Nuttall (@nuttall_luke)
