Ya dancer: with the first offering from their fifth album, Idles served notice. The opening orchestral flourish and heavy-metal disco of ‘Dancer’, released as a single in October, is where the Bristol mob’s head and heart and feet are at right now, seven years on from their debut and with the band riding high as Britain’s biggest crossover, most passionately beloved hardcore rockers.

With backing vocals from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang, the song has more than a little of the punchy rhythm’n’roll of that New York band. And with singer Joe Talbot declaiming like a pumped-up spin-class trainer (‘shoulders back chest out / I’m poised like a goddamn ape so to speak / I can taste the mood in my mouth / like particles of punch drunk love / and the sweat’), the message is clear: Idles are back and they’re bringing the passionate party.

Or, as Talbot has said by way of a cryptic album manifesto, ‘I needed love. So I made it. I gave love out to the world and it feels like magic. This is our album of gratitude and power. All love songs. All is love.’ And so, Tangk: an album named after, in their words, ‘an onomatopoeic reference to the lashing way the band imagined the guitars sounding that has since grown into a sigil for living in love.’ The co-producers are, brilliantly, Nigel Godrich (aka the sixth member of Radiohead), Kenny Beats (leftfield American hip hop a speciality) and band guitarist Mark Bowen: a dream team of experience, experimentalism and exceptional understanding of intra-band dynamics. The result is a pure thrill ride of a record, boasting sonic smarts, songwriterly nuance and melodic brawn.

Tangk begins with ‘IDEA 01’, a rippling, piano-led overture, Talbot giving it his best croon on a track that could have been beamed from the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions. Then we gallop straight into ‘Gift Horse’, as ferocious as it’s thrilling, and on into ‘POP POP POP’, a techno throb bleeding in from a dark-web nightclub. On ‘Grace’, Talbot dials it back, singing with choirboy lilt over furniture-shifting bass and a jittery hi-hat beat, hymning the message at this album’s heart: ‘no crown, no ring, I said love is the thing.’

We’re back into more familiar, but no less bracing Idles territory with the moshpit ramalam of ‘Hall & Oates’. Their sonic debt to the titular blue-eyed soul boys is not immediately obvious, until, at least, towards the vibrant finale where everything drops away bar thunderous drums and Talbot, again, going for mellifluous croon over guttural roar.

Best moment on an album precision-tooled to combine edgy electronics with chunky riffs and sharp songwriting? Right now, it’s the line on the turbulent, Bo Diddley-on-snakebite anthem that is ‘Jungle’: ‘I found myself underneath a Scotsman’s boot / they proceed to fill me in.’ When this year’s biggest ever tour by Idles (a band dancing and swaggering their way towards festival headline status) finally rolls up to Glasgow’s Hydro come November, you just know that line will bring the dome down.

Tangk is released by Partisan Records on Friday 16 February; Idles are on tour throughout 2024; main picture by Tom Ham.