Like a surveillance drone pulling away from Earth, Squid songs are likely to have a queasy type 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 solid their gaze wider than ever. Their 2021 debut LP, Shiny Inexperienced Subject, was a frothy-mouthed post-punk diatribe towards capitalist drudgery and Britain’s slide into far-right politics. The jazzier, looser 2023 follow-up O Monolith solid a wider web, inserting the visceral second of Shiny Inexperienced Subject in its broader social context, engulfing subjects similar to police brutality, historic British folklore, and the UK’s relationship with rats.
Cowards may very well be seen as the ultimate instalment in a twisted trilogy: This time, Squid zoom out even additional, taking as their material evil itself. Trying effectively past the instant 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 hear but.
Squid songs are likely to have a metamorphic power, starting life as one factor earlier than impishly remodeling into one thing else completely. 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In most of those songs, Choose’s lyrics foreground an antihero: a brutish, Outdated Testomony God-style determine who acts as a counterpoint to the music’s mischievousness.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 dangerous man who the narrator can not convey himself to chop ties with. In the meantime, over fantastically coruscating synths, “Crispy Pores and skin” tells the story of a residing in a society pushed to cannibalism (“It’s turn 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.
