Photo Gallery: Idles at Riviera Theatre

Brassneck | October 9, 2021

Idles

Friday, October 8

Riviera Theatre

Chicago, IL

Recap and photos by Curt Baran

When Idles released their Ultra Mono record in September 2020, the British quintet was already riding a wave of both critical and commercial success. Of course, by then, the world had stopped as did their momentum. Not satisfied to remain…um, idle, the band holed up and began working on the next batch of songs.

Crawler is slated to hit the shelves next month, but the band isn’t waiting for the next industry tour cycle. They hit the boards now, and that impatience brought them to the Riviera Theatre in Uptown Friday night. They wasted little time laying waste to their sonic landscape, which featured a career spanning set list, guitar solos while crowd surfing and group sing-alongs to muscular, feminist-tinged rally cries. Brooklyn’s Gustaf faced the uphill battle of preceding them as openers – accepted and met the challenge.