Like a surveillance drone pulling away from Earth, Squid songs are likely to have a queasy sort of overview impact, a way of seeing and feeling an excessive amount of . The five-piece is among the many most experimental new voices to emerge in British guitar music within the 2020s, and on Cowards, Squid’s third album in solely 4 years for Warp, they forged their gaze wider than ever. Their 2021 debut LP, Vivid Inexperienced Discipline, was a frothy-mouthed post-punk diatribe in opposition to capitalist drudgery and Britain’s slide into far-right politics. The jazzier, looser 2023 follow-up O Monolith forged a wider internet, putting the visceral second of Vivid Inexperienced Discipline in its broader social context, engulfing subjects corresponding to police brutality, historical British folklore, and the UK’s relationship with rats.
Cowards might be seen as the ultimate instalment in a twisted trilogy: This time, Squid zoom out even additional, taking as their material evil itself. Trying properly past the quick UK context, right here their kaleidoscopic post-rock refracts all of the ugliest impulses of humanity—cowardice, apathy, greed, and bloodlust. Lead singer and percussionist Ollie Choose has described the file as “like a e-book of darkish fairytales.” By turns ominous and opulent, it’s the band’s most restlessly expansive pay attention but.
Squid songs are likely to have a metamorphic power, starting life as one factor earlier than impishly remodeling into one thing else totally. On Cowards, this shape-shifting sensibility is extra alive than ever: “Blood on the Boulders,” a story in regards to the Manson murders, is a quintessential instance, veering between discordant, rapturous screams and a cloying whisper that sits on the pores and skin like California warmth. On the dyad of “Fieldworks I” and “Fieldworks II,” a whimsical processed harpsichord offers a direct juxtaposition to percussion that ticks like a clock, producing an enveloping sense of dread.
In most of those songs, Choose’s lyrics foreground an antihero: a brutish, Previous Testomony God-style determine who acts as a counterpoint to the music’s mischievousness. “Constructing 650” dovetails a playful guitar lick with the story of Frank, a “good man” but very unhealthy man who the narrator can’t convey himself to chop ties with. In the meantime, over superbly coruscating synths, “Crispy Pores and skin” tells the story of a dwelling in a society pushed to cannibalism (“It’s develop into really easy,” Choose sings about tucking into human flesh). And “Showtime!,” an explosive five-minute musing on the manipulations of fame, takes on the voice of a Warhol-esque determine who guarantees to make you a footnote in his story. Embodying this sinister character, Choose’s vocals prowl, darkish and low like smoke, over the funhouse mirror floor of glitching electronics and juddering strings.
