Hope Is Important is the first full-length studio album by Scottish rock band Idlewild, released 26 October 1998. The record follows on from their earlier six-track release, Captain. It was recorded over a four-week period between February and June, 1997 in Chapel Studios, Lincolnshire. Roddy Woomble said of the title that it was one of those phrases "that can be taken completely literally as some kind of positive statement or it can mean absolutely nothing and it is in-between somewhere. I don't want to be purposefully vague, but it is a vague title." Roddy Woomble told DJ Steve Lamacq in 1997 that they felt that the mini album Captain was their proper first album and that Hope Is Important is their second. "We were a bit scared initially to branch out and write sort of ballad-y songs, not ballad-y songs, but you know what I mean. And we just went for it, really. Bob Fairfoull: "We were just doing what we did best, I think, at the time." Roddy Woomble: "Now we are really trying to change a wee bit, and lyrically, I supposed it is a wee bit depressing, but it's definitely an improvement." Roddy Woomble told The Skinny in a video interview in 2015 that the album was recorded "in stages" because there was a desire to keep the band on tour as much as possible. "So rather than laterally we would record an album in one go, or two gos, we kind of did bits and pieces all through that year until the album was done. A Film For The Future was the first single from Hope Is Important and that kind of launched our career on a major label. Because up until that point we had always been on independent labels. So, yeah, I think there was high hopes for that song and I think to a certain degree it established us, a wee bit. And it was a good song to be known for when we were playing live, because our live concerts were known for, like, chaos and excitement. Of course, the way we play it now is completely different." In a 2007 interview, Roddy Woomble states that the band were:
one of the last of those sort of groups, I suppose, that weren’t totally judged on their first album. Which is just as well, as that record is messy and it’s noisy… yeah, I mean Hope Is Important. It’s a band trying to discover what they want to sound like, and if that record came out now it’d either be massive or totally ignored. Thankfully there were bits in the songs that had people thinking we could be better, and that we could evolve.
The album was played in full on 17 December 2008 at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow. Hope Is Important was included in a list of writers' favourite Scottish albums published by national Scottish newspaper, The Herald. Chosen by journalist Martin Williams, he described it as "a startling explosion of singalong hooks, soft-loud dynamics and crashing guitars with one song A FilmFor The Future that could sum up manic pop rock thrills for aliens".
