Hot on the heels of what many are describing as the stand out set of this year’s Glastonbury festival, and for my money one of the most zeitgeist grabbing performances in those fields in Somerset from an upcoming British band in the best part of two decades, IDLES are back with a double a-side single of off cuts from the Joy As An Act Of Resistance sessions, Mercedes Marxist and I Dream Guillotine.

While on paper taking unreleased recordings from a past session and releasing them on vinyl may sound like something of a money grab what we get here certainly doesn’t, in fact we get two tracks that stand apart from the material on Joy while maintaining IDLES’ unique personality.

Mercedes Marxist is a slower burn of a song, and I’ll be honest took a couple of listens to click for me, but once it did it revealed itself to be viciously insistent, in its own way more so than anything on Joy.

In this it’s possibly the band’s most straightforwardly rabble-rousing number to date, certainly up there with Mother‘s Tory baiting lyrics and being possibly their most direct political criticism thus far as well.

I can only imagine this will be massive live and it’s a shame it missed that Glastonbury set.

I Dream Guillotine meanwhile is more immediately engaging while being equally as political as its counterpart.

Even though the band seem to have an aversion to the word it’s also arguably their most outright punk track to date and brings its politics and social commentary back down to street level like a slap in the face while the title is possibly their most obviously revolutionary too.

Certainly then this doesn’t feel like just a simple stop-gap, cash-in while the band are out on the road as the two forceful, energetic, tracks work together brilliantly in a way they wouldn’t have done if they’d been included on Joy.

With this they continue to show IDLES are a band who, despite (or perhaps because of) the increased media exposure they are receiving, still feel like they have a point to make and aren’t going to be backing down anytime soon.