Squid continue their evolution with third album Cowards. Equally rich in levels of grandeur and evil, the nine distinct tales within this release unfurl a vantablack comedy. Luke Bower digs deeper below.
Squid have remained an enigmatic muscle amidst the contorting body of experimental art rock in the 21st Century. Their output as a band has retained an inexplicable stamina since their first releases under prestigious South London label Speedy Wunderground, which has nurtured the likes of black midi and Black Country New Road into household names over the years. Cut from the same cloth as these notable groups that have defined South London’s celebrated music scene, Squid’s boundary pushing ethos and creative attentiveness has become a cornerstone of the scene’s distinctiveness, with their meticulously calculated live shows and full length records never failing to deliver.Â
Their latest Cowards is indeed no exception. Where 2019’s Bright Green Field confined its listener to it’s concrete dystopian skylines, and 2022’s O Monolith explored sprawling landscapes of folklore and nature, Cowards instead favours to operate in the depths below: the seediness of sociopathy, the idolism of cults, the evil of world leaders. It doesn’t discern itself as an obliquely political project, but it undoubtedly boils under the surface of its entirety. The record is produced by Marta Salogni alongside a plethora of collaborators, including Dan Carey, bringing with it a refreshing method to the madness of Cowards’ disconcerting lyrical atmosphere.Â
Given the density of its themes, Squid often pull their punches instrumentally, in an attempt to place their vignettes and microcosms of evil to the forefront of the project. It manifests in a listen that rests on the shoulders of the atmospheres the band are expertly able to create, upholstering its listener in a barren, treacherous landscape that antagonises the Brighton based outfit’s familiar instrumental rubric. This approach to the record is instantly disconcerting in this regard, yet gives an uncomplicated backdrop to let lead vocalist Ollie Judge’s ominous storytelling unfold.
Take track three Blood on the Boulders, which tackles the lunacy and complicity surrounded with mysterious cult-like groups and their followers respectively. It opens with mediative observation, before descending into a frenetic critique of media obsessiveness over said groups with the refrain ‘we return to the scene, oh time and time again’. It’s an effective vessel to explore the nature of cult’s hypnotism, mimicking the ‘brainwashing’ of members by beckoning and entrancing the listener in its soundscapes, lead expertly through Judge’s unwavering, monotonous vocals.
The rest of the tracklist follows suit, with non-single tracks leading the charge to characterise the record’s foreboding personality. Fieldworks I and Fieldworks II seem to question notions of fear and anxiety to villainous persons, but simultaneously grapples the moral questioning of the protagonist’s own evil and complicity; ‘I fell into it, just fell into it’; ‘if you remind me I’m evil too’. The nuance of the topics Squid decide to explore here are accompanied by cinematic, sprawling instrumentals in collaboration with the Ruisi Quartet, which add an appropriately expressive character to the tracks. The Fieldworks titles also share the same name with the band’s socially-distanced tour in 2021, which saw them experiment with work in progress music, raising questions as to whether these instrumental passages have been kept on the back-burner for quite some time.
Despite the band’s yearning of expansive soundscapes on Cowards, the record possesses many of Squid’s recognisable mannerisms that still hold significant ground. Kraut-rock tendencies and rhythmic meticulousness manifest on lead single Crispy Skin, that opens the album through its driving bassline and ominous synth leads. Judge describes the song as being inspired by the novel ‘Tender is the Flesh’, which details a dystopian future where society legalises cannibalism. The track is unsettling in its imagery as a result, yet melodically beautiful in its back half as piano arrangements take centre stage. It’s an album highlight for sure, given its catchiness and instrumental hypnotism, yet it’s perhaps more impressive and exemplary as a staple of the capabilities of the art-rock genre that Squid continue to push.
As previously alluded to, Cowards is at its best when its lyrical contents take the forefront, a sentiment I never thought possible given Squid’s past instrumental prowess. This is especially so on Building 650: a thought provoking vignette of its protagonists role as an accessory to crime, set in the underbelly of Tokyo’s red light district. The narrator tells of their complicity to their friend’s murderous behaviour and torture methods: ‘Frank’s my friend, he’s my friend, we are friends, there’s murder sometimes’. On the surface, the track elicits the mood of a dystopian thriller, yet maybe more so is used as a semi-satirical critique to the ambivalence of 21st Century morality, and the danger of not holding those close to you accountable for wrongdoings. The track is accompanied by an excellent music video directed by Felix Green, Daisuke Hasegawa and Kuya Tatsujo, that chronicles the track’s storytelling in a Wong Kar-Wai-esque fashion.
The record’s closing 20 minutes deliver some of the outfit’s most ambitious creative endeavours to date, with it’s title track detailing the fear of hopelessness in a society riddled by evil against swelling chords and horn sections. Showtime! lays down a dizzyingly complex groove before plummeting into walls of psychedelic guitar wails and synthesisers, which will without doubt become a staple spectacle of the band’s upcoming live shows. Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence) bookends the album with a droning, zealous flourish, whilst still offering melodic brevity to bring the record to a close. This is largely in part due to the additional vocalists included on the track, that offer a uniquely gracious quality to Squid’s cinematic compositions. Aside from this, Well Met ends the album on a bleak, pessimistic note, with the insistence that ‘the future’s perfect from the backseat’; another assessment from the band to the peril associated with complicity and immoral accustoms.Â
Cowards is a unique entry in Squid’s discography. It’s perhaps their first full length that utterly lends itself as an album rather than an experimental set of songs; a fully fleshed out recording that requires an uninterrupted listen to be completely enveloped in it’s bleak mood of macabre. While it certainly doesn’t reach the highs of O Monolith on the surface, Squid’s latest propels the outfit into being on the precipice of grandeur in more ways than not. Above all though, Cowards meanders seamlessly through snippets of visceral storytelling and vivid musicianship that goes deeper than a self-described ‘album about evil’ that the band asserts. Rather, it delves into the psyche of those that observe evil and are complicit to it. It paints a vague portrait of the various plagues of tyranny and immorality in the 21st Century, yet pays closer attention to those that are unwilling to act against it, those that standby and watch, and those that are perhaps more cowardly than the most malicious of figures themselves.Â
Luke Bower
Squid are set to embark on a UK tour showcasing the release of Cowards, with dates as follows:
February:
17 – Liverpool, Invisible Wind FactoryÂ
18 – Manchester, O2 RitzÂ
19 – Glasgow, Old FruitmarketÂ
21 – Newcastle, NSU DomainÂ
22 – Sheffield, LeadmillÂ
24 – Cambridge, Junction 1Â
25 – Norwich, The Adrian Flux WaterfrontÂ
27 – Oxford, O2 AcademyÂ
28 – Southampton, Engine RoomsÂ
March:
1 – Margate, LidoÂ
2 – Brighton, ChalkÂ
4 – Birmingham, XOYOÂ
5 – Bristol, BeaconÂ
April:
26 – London, Roundhouse
Edited by Alice Beard
Cowards LP cover cr. Ben Sifel / Photography by Tonje Tielsen, in article image cr. Harrison Fishman, video courtesy of Squid on Youtube