At the tail-end of the 2010s, Squid emerged alongside Black Midi and Black Country, New Road as part of a golden trifecta for the iconoclastic South London singles label Speedy Wunderground. A real revitalising moment for British guitar music, this trio of spookily young groups combined virtuous musicality with a diverse and incongruous canon of influences to make some of the most exciting and experimental rock music seen on these shores for generations.
Helmed by singing drummer Ollie Judge, Squid were among the most explosive live prospects in the country, and the group quickly accumulated a devoted following for their eternal, yearning space jams that crash-landed somewhere between the in-vogue post-punk of their contemporaries and the very best cosmic rock of 70s Canterbury and Cologne.
Signature early singles like ‘Houseplants’, a convulsing Contortions-indebted earworm, and ‘The Cleaner’, a spiralling no-wave disco sprawl, made good on the buzz surrounding the quintet, and their debut Bright Green Field was released on Warp in 2021 to much critical adoration.
However, whilst these early moments earmarked Squid as a truly exhilarating rock band, possibly the absolute best rock band to flirt with the current UK mainstream, their recent trajectory has not been so straightforward.
Whilst Bright Green Field did offer respite from the righteous maelstrom with some short jazzy segues, the 2023 follow up O Monolith was an altogether more textural affair that saw Squid consciously try to become something more. It belied a band not content with simply becoming the UK’s most vital rock group, but a group always writhing, evolving, fluctuating.
It’s this yearning to be something more that characterises Cowards, the group’s prickly third LP. Ollile Judge and the rest of the band set out to veer the songwriting away from the abstraction of O Monolith (an album title they chose, without deciding a meaning for), but the music has become ever more surreal, vivid and painterly as the group’s sonic palette broadens. Squid’s most experimental tendencies take hold, with their tetchy krautrock id only peaking occasionally through the miasma of the band’s dense impressionist soundscapes. Modular synths, discordant strings, and wilting brass melodies often overpower the twin guitars of the core group, whilst rumbling basslines are often sidelined for more delicate touches, either from Laurie Nankivell’s cornet or a litany of collaborators.
A Pet Sounds, except all of the pets are scorpions, and tarantulas, and maybe some stick insects too – large sections speak to an album composed, in large parts, in the studio, away from the hurly-burly of the group’s live shows. Cowards is very much a post-rock album, but the deliberate and meditative first wave post-rock of Talk Talk, Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis, as their trademark kosmische skronk fades in and out of consciousness, competing for space with sweltering string arrangements and a range of modular synth apparitions.
No more apparent is this than on ‘Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence)’, the album’s astral closing scene. Sounding somewhat like a Laughing Stock outtake, Squid here combine swarming drones and discreet glitching synth melodies, whilst guest vocalist Clarissa Connelly’s spectral vocals float atop the warped composition. Across its eight minute runtime, it’s a showcase for the ambition the group have, a glimpse into the technicolour future the band yearn for.
Elsewhere, the post-rock manifestations can be found all over the record. ‘Fieldworks I’ channels the ghostly ambient pop of David Sylvian or Oneohtrix Point Never with an exoskeleton of dusty, arpeggiated chimes channeling forces most sinister, whilst ‘Fieldworks II’ takes its main percussive thrust from the tick of a clock and its melodic intrigue from a dizzy string quartet. Meanwhile ‘Cowards’ is a rippling jazz fusion number that sees Judge’s croon supplemented by some exquisite noodling, and ‘Showtime!’ is a batshit collage of glitching synthesiser and hellbound violin.
Even the more accessible, rock-indebted songs, the trojan horse singles, are deeply weird numbers – equal parts bold and brilliant in their scope. ‘Crispy Skin’, with its vivid lyrics drawn from cannibal novel Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, is propelled forward by a bittersweet piano melody, with lightning strike guitar licks simply another texture. Meanwhile, ‘Building 650’ is a brutalist stomper that melds spidery post-hardcore guitars with a litany of droning brass and synth parts, making it rich in skin-crawling cinematic melodrama.
Cowards is lyrical about the evil that men do, a series of nine vignettes from the perspective of cannibals and murderers. Judge’s lyrics are often fragmentary, deft and abstract observations that paint visceral pictures in the imagination – “your salty back is shaking / past the edge, bones are sinking” is a particularly evocative couplet from ‘Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence)’ that, when sung by Connelly, lives long in the mind’s eye after the record has finished spinning. Whilst guitar music has a vast – possibly oversaturated – history of male performers writing about murder and torture, the album title alone will tell you that an attitude of reverence or deification isn’t very high up Judge’s agenda.
Cowards is the latest evolution of one of Britain’s most exciting groups, a record that sees them become weirder, wilder and more exploratory with age. Whilst some may pine for the intense and explosive krautrock of their debut, the adventurous spirit with which they tackle post-rock, fusion and a universe of soundscapes ensures that this is the most exciting and volatile the group has ever sounded.
