IST IST: Light A Bigger Fire – Review – ALBUM OF THE WEEK!

IST IST release their fourth album and it’s a grand leap forward that defines their sound and their work ethic. John Robb reviews…

There is often a sticking point in many bands’ careers where they have to take their music and their art to the people. It’s the career curve every creative has to deal with – some scuttle back into the underground and some dare to engage with the world. Neither are wrong or right, but when a band breaks cult and takes its art to the masses and it works then it can be a glorious moment.

It’s that time-honoured journey. A new band appears on the scene like a startled deer trapped in the unexpected headlights of attention. They can have a brilliant idea and sound that will captivate about a hundred people on the local scene. They then may get some media support and graft ignored for many years as they hone their art down to perfection. If they have the magic and the luck, then things start to move, and it feels like maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world may understand their labours.

This is then the tough bit – how to go overground without wrecking what made them so brilliant in the first place. Every classic band from Joy Division to the Beatles to the Bunnymen navigated this at some point in their own career curve.

IST IST are no different. 

The challenge is overcoming the fear of pop and how can a precious art make sense to the world.

IST IST have tackled this head-on. 

Always a deep-thinking band that wears their art on their sleeves, they have embraced the possibilities of pop and lost none of their own dark visions. The Manchester band’s fourth album sees them find a perfect hybrid of their dark energy post-punk and huge widescreen arena pop. 

The sound on ‘Light A Bigger Fire’ is huge, and the songs are even bigger. Bringing in producer Joe Cross has helped the band find this mystical blend. The producer whose impressive CV features the likes of Courteeners, Hurts, Louis Tomlinson and the Slow Readers Club has a keen understanding of how to find the perfect alchemy between the aching yearning darker sound of IST IST and the kind of formulae that radio like 6music demands of bands. It’s the kind of warmth that sounds good on car stereos and huge arenas in the modern pop battleground.

IST IST’s last album, ‘Protagonists’, was a big step on this journey, but ‘Light A Bigger Fire’ places them in the heart of the modern pop world. Songs of heartbreak have never sounded so radio friendly without losing their introspective heart and soul. All the band’s classic hallmarks are still in place, from the melancholic bass lines, to the washes of atmospheric keyboards shackled to the tightest drums, the chiming guitar shapes and the baritone vocals and yet reshaped to reach out from beyond the cult.

It’s a perfect blend that will soundtrack the inner melancholia of the grey sky modern world for deeply personal headphone immersion and also sound great on the football on TV. It will sit on playlists but also remain a private journey. Ist Ist are just about to become ubiquitous without losing any of their beauty.

The album is full of singles and sounds like an greatest hits collection waiting to happen. Dreams Aren’t Enough is all descending bass lines, chiming guitars and a huge chorus. Something Else will be filling Goth Club dance floors across Europe with its mountainous alpine dynamics that swirl from huge washes of keyboards to stripped down chugging bass verses. Lead single Lost My Shadow is everything you love about the band already – big chasms of sound, deeply personal deep vocals and driving bass lines turned into triumphant pop that will have huge mosh pits bouncing at 2025 festivals, whilst XXX is the sound of introspection over a pulsating death disco, Ghost ends the album with a shuddering ballad that sounds like one of those songs that gets played when they celebrate the end of history events like the breaking down of the Berlin wall – it’s one of those huge phones in their air anthems that takes the deeply personal and magnifies it into the anthemic as it explodes as the perfect album bookend.

Manchester based bands are good at this kind of stuff – combining the melancholic with the euphoric. IST IST are the 21st century take on this, and this is the album that will break them out because they dared to dream and they dared to make the personal public, and they dared to take their much loved shadowy sound and turn it into glorious yet introspective 21st-century pop music.

Words by LTW Editor in Chief John Robb.