Instants by The Idiot Kids: Album Review

by admin December 13, 2025

December 13, 2025

Instants by The Idiot Kids: Album Review

The Idiot Kids return with Instants, a blistering indie-punk document of urgency, anxiety, and self-reckoning shaped entirely by frontperson Jon-Mikal, who performs every instrument for the first time in the band’s history. With rehearsal time shrinking and life stretching everyone thin, the project naturally evolved into a solo-recording endeavor, while the live lineup continues as a rotating collective. That shift, paired with influences ranging from Elliott Smith to Iggy & The Stooges, mewithoutYou, Fugazi, and The Cure, gives Instants a raw, instinct-driven intensity—something that feels both deeply personal and fiercely present-tense.

Written as a reaction to 2020’s emotionally heavy Chapels, a record born from unpacking queerness, religion, and trauma, Instants is Jon-Mikal deciding to stop overthinking and instead move purely on gut energy. That ethos crackles through the entire album, recorded and mixed entirely at home on affordable gear using no samples, AI, or triggers.

The opener “Bulldozer” lives up to its name. Frantic drums and gritty grinding guitars tear forward, while the eccentric, shrill, high vocal rushes out like a pressure valve bursting. It’s the sound of thoughts arriving too fast to catch, anger and exhaustion combusting into motion.

Then “Age of Instants” hits, still riding that gritty guitar edge but slowing emotionally into something more contemplative. The tension just simmers, reflecting the album’s obsession with a world addicted to immediacy and overstimulation.

“Mr. E” arrives with thumping drums and churning guitars churning like internal machinery overheating, and Jon-Mikal shrilling with such tension, intense angst tightly held in her throat, for a looming threat: “Mr. E” coming for her.

As a whole, Instants is loud, raw, unfiltered—an album about exhaustion and survival, about queerness and fear, about the way our minds race in a world built on instant gratification. Listen to it on Spotify.