Idles have shared the Michel Gondry- (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Daft Punk, The White Stripes) and Olivier Gondry-directed (in collaboration with WePresent) video for new single ‘Model Village’ – the fourth track to be taken from forthcoming album ‘Ultra Mono’ (25 September).
The song finds Joe Talbot rallying against the small-town fishbowl mentality (something that sadly seems to have been amplified in Covid-19 times) over a relentless, pacy rhym section that combines the band’s love of hip-hop with potent punk: ‘They ain’t too friendly in the village. There’s a tabloid frenzy in the village. ‘He’s not a racist but…’ in the village’.
Idles continue to deliver their message of unity over conflict as the song drives forward and they take aim at those with appalling racist views: ‘Model far, model right, model village. I see a lot of gammon in the village. I don’t see a lot happen in the village. Just give them an anthem and they’ll sing it. Still they don’t know the meanings in it. Just saluting flags cause it’s British’.
The video was painstakingly pieced together over a period of weeks, with Michel held up in his LA studio, cutting out hand-drawn bits of paper into characters and shapes, arranging them on lightboxes, and filming from above on his iPhone before sending everything to Olivier in Paris, where he’d then take the collages and bring them to life through CGI. On the creation of the video, Talbot explains: “Michel’s work is handmade and it’s human and that’s something that our society pushes against: you need to be perfect. You need to look perfect and everything needs to be seamless and strong. But actually, vulnerability and naivety are strengths.”
