Wizz

Album: Crawler (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • For 15 years, Idles frontman Joe Talbot struggled with substance abuse until he eventually sorted his life out. This track finds the singer detailing the contents of texts sent to him by his drug dealer in his addiction days. "I'm fascinated by the dichotomy of where I was then," he told Mojo magazine. "I was a piece of s--t. I was a really horrible person to myself and other people. I was just an addict and just did what addicts do, which is lie and let people down a lot."
  • Musically, this 30-second track is inspired by the extreme metal micro-genre powerviolence, an extremely dissonant and fast type of hardcore punk. Originating in the late 1980s/early 1990s, powerviolence is closely related to thrashcore and grindcore, with the addition of wildly fluctuating song tempos.

    Idles were introduced to the genre by their sound engineer Chris Fullard, who also works with powerviolence acts Boris and SunnO. "There's this one Japanese band and one of the songs is just them bulldozing a venue," Talbot told Mojo magazine admiringly.
  • Idles recorded "Wizz" for Crawler, which tells Talbot's story of his long fight with alcoholism and drug abuse and how he came through the other side. The album delves into the worst years of the singer's life, but also the best. "If you don't like hearing tales of struggle then you won't like it," he told Mojo. "But it makes me feel happy because I'm here. I'm alive."

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