Joy as an Act of Resistance is the second studio album by British rock band Idles, released on 31 August 2018 by Partisan Records.
Following the success of their debut album Brutalism, the band started recording new material. Taking inspiration from the similarly titled 2008 poem by Toi Derricotte, Joy as an Act of Resistance tells stories from lead singer Joe Talbot's troubled past. Its lyrics deal with toxic masculinity, self-love, immigration, Brexit, and class.
The album garnered acclaim from critics upon release. Joy as an Act of Resistance peaked at number 5 on the UK Albums Chart and spawned two official singles: "Danny Nedelko" and "Never Fight a Man with a Perm".
To promote the record, the band toured across Japan, North America, and Europe.
Joy as an Act of Resistance was met with widespread critical acclaim. Jordan Bassett, reviewing the album for NME, awarded the album five stars, calling it "an instant classic".
Dave Simpson, for The Guardian gave it four stars, describing it as "11 songs of focused, cathartic rage, rooted in their own experiences", and calling Idles "Britain’s most necessary band".
Mark Beaumont of The Independent also gave it four stars.
Dom Gourlay, for Drowned in Sound, called it "one of 2018's most eagerly anticipated releases", awarding it a score of 9 out of 10, and going on to say that it is "everything anyone could have wanted or expected it to be: Idles have released the most relevant and at times gut wrenching album of the year." Classic Rock magazine gave it the same score, calling it "a heart-breaking but jubilant exploration of joy, honesty, fragility and expression as our most powerful means of human resistance".
Joy as an Act of Resistance is a great punk rock album by IDLES. All tracks are full of passion, power and vulnerability. "Colossus" and "Danny Nedelko" are two of their best tracks.
Wow… this is really impressive modern punk rock - angry, smart, compassionate, insightful… didn’t see this coming. The album cover with a wedding brawl from the year of my birth added to the whole experience as well.
November 14, 2025
HL: "Colossus", "Scum", "Danny Nedelko", "Samaritans", "Great"
Wild connection to the original list, in that "Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke is track 11. Completely did not notice it, until I read that they covered it as an apparent reference to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. (I haven't seen the movie and Solomon Burke is NOT on the soundtrack CD I have at home.)
Anyway, listening to this right after Songs: Ohia was some fine whiplash. I surprise myself by preferring IDLES's 2018 release, considering I would typically choose melancholy folk after something that takes after the 80s/90s hardcore scene. (I would have believed that "Television" was from a Black Flag album)
I was put off listening to this LP when it dropped for some reason, maybe because my early listens felt so dramatically different from the lean, gritty perfection of 'Brutalism.'
Listening in full now, some of those early beliefs are dispelled and some confirmed – the opening salvo through the middle of the LP rips, the wiry guitar and unique arrangements giving the band a distinct, different sound from their debut while remaining distinctly IDLES. It was the complete antithesis of what I needed while stuck on a flight, the album daring me to sit with all that energy and raw power it was delivering. Midway through, however, glaring issues with the songwriting start to drag the momentum down no matter how hard the band continues to charge ahead. Joe Talbot's lyricism has always been as subtle as a brick to the face, but the blatant lecturing and talking really weighs down some solid instrumentals with cringey declarations and virtue signaling. I don't disagree with what he's saying, but some of the diatribe just feels awkward in the way it's phrased and arranged in the song, an issue that's only grown worse on the band's later releases.
Couple that with a lack of dynamic contrast in the LP's closing half and some repetitive guitar work and it feels more crash landing than smooth conclusion. I once heard somebody on Stereogum deride a later IDLES single for being 'another song where the guitar player just bends the root note for 4 minutes' and it's hard to look past that issue here with the other problems going on. There are some great tracks here and I mostly enjoyed the listen, just feel that this band needs to get out of its own way sometimes.
I don’t know, this modern iteration of post-punk really doesn’t do much for me. Appreciate it and there were definitely a few highlights here, but I haven’t really found a band that really does it for me - I’m not sure that a lot of it is offering up something new…I might just throw on a Jesus Lizard record instead, you know what I mean?
Was absolutely NOT vibing with this today. Never commits to a single sound or genre enough to feel like its worth my time. Came away with lots of thoughts, but the prevailing one is "GRATING"
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