Hear IDLES cover Little Simz for the band’s first Spotify Singles release

Ahead of this month’s highly-anticipated Other Stage headline set at Glastonbury, IDLES have just done their first-ever Spotify Singles session.

The band have reworked a fan-favourite – Roy – from this year’s TANGK album for the two-song drop, but perhaps even more interestingly, they’ve tackled a Little Simz cover, too.

Apparently mutual fans of each other, IDLES have performed Mood Swings from the British rapper’s 2024 Drop 7 EP, also incorporating Peaches’ Fuck The Pain Away and The Chemical Brothers’ Elektrobank as part of the cover.

Listen to IDLES’ Spotify Singles below:

Speaking to Kerrang! for a track-by-track breakdown of TANGK, IDLES frontman Joe Talbot told us at the start of the year about guitarist Mark Bowen writing Roy, and how it all came about.

“He was obsessed with counting things out on this album, and did weird counts, like 7/12,” Joe explained. “I’m making that up, not 7/12, but it was really annoying counts, anyway. But all I wanted to do was make people dance. So we’re coming from very different angles, musically. Not in his mind, but definitely in my mind. I just couldn’t get on board with his fucking beats. But this one was like a beat from a Roy Orbison tune, kind of, and I loved that.

“I had this idea for the guitar, and Bowen wrote this really beautiful bridge, but at the time it was the chorus. We were going round and round in circles in London on this fucking thing. And then just as we’re packing up – Jon [Beavis, drums] had already packed the drums away – I came up with this drum fill for the end of the verse, to elevate it into this chorus that I’ve been trying to write for four years. It’s like Motown soul tune chorus, kind of like Lemos’ Bad Girl where there’s the fill, and it’s organs or trumpets, you know, like a horn section, and it feels in your memory so much bigger than it actually is. So we unpacked the drums and set them back up again, and wrote the beat in literally two minutes. We found an organ, which sounded sick, and then Bowen just hit this one note on his guitar and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s it.’ That was one of my favourite moments, writing whole album, when I finally got that chorus out!

“It was worth the wait, you know? And that’s why I wrote the song about my girlfriend. You just learn patience and wait for things, and good things come when you treat things with respect and you wait patiently and you just seize the day.”

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