Album Of The Week: Squid Cowards

Ollie Judge introduces Squid's new album Cowards by imagining life as a cannibal. "We call it/ Something else/ To disguise/ Our memory," he begins, before later adding: "I couldn't eat/ Another thing/ No more pages and pages of crispy skin." It's not quite as twisted or out-of-left-field as it appears; Judge took inspiration from Agustina Bazterrica's novel Tender Is The Flesh. Over first a discomfiting bed of gnarled guitars and corroded synths and then a surprisingly beautiful piano melody, this is just the latest surreal reintroduction to the strange and anxious world Squid occupies. And on Cowards, Squid's songwriting and lyricism alike sharpen to get to the guts of things, capturing an illness at the heart of the world that only seems to have metastasized during the years the band has been chronicling it.

Cowards marks Squid's third album in just under four years and, like many of their contemporaries awkwardly lumped together under the "post-punk revival," they continue to restlessly mutate far beyond the signifiers of their original breakthrough sound. The quintet said Cowards represents their attempt to hone in on songcraft and eschew the complex layers of its 2023 predecessor O Monolith. Yet Cowards scans as Squid becoming rangier and woolier. Where before their music coiled, now it unspools. The seething tension of young Squid has given way to a searching, frayed soundtrack for the long generational experience of the center refusing to hold.

"Am I the bad one? Yep, yes I am," Judge sings in the chorus of "Crispy Skin." Early on, he provides the framing mechanism for Cowards, nine songs cataloguing evildoers in various forms, around the world. "This record seems more like a book of dark fairytales to me," Judge told The Line Of Best Fit, departing from observational scenes and characters to a haunting fantasy world mirroring our own. In various interviews, the band has cited their customarily vast array of influences that somehow got boiled down into a cohesive body of work. One of the most important spiritual forebears for Cowards is perhaps unlikely: Judge spoke of Bruce Springsteen's iconic outlier Nebraska, an album "largely written about evil people but peppered with fleeting moments of redemption."

While name-checking an album by one of the most American artists, itself named for the middle wastelands of the country, might seem odd from art-rockers who originated playing jazz in Brighton, Cowards is influenced by much further-flung places. Thus far, Squid's discography has been a gradual journey out into the world — first, Bright Green Field rendering Brexit-era London as a sci-fi dystopia, then O Monolith turning to the ancient secrets and folklore of the English countryside in strained hopes of making sense of our present. By the band's estimation, Cowards is formed by the severe dichotomies of in-the-moment awe and head-spinning displacement that comes with the fast-paced travel of tour. They read books from various traditions, they set songs in Tokyo and New York and Eastern Europe. The connective tissue is Squid expanding their once-local depictions of societal inertia to concerns more global and worldwide: a never-ending cycle of the cruelty humans can inflict upon one another.

Across the rest of the album, there's rarely a moment as obviously garish as "Crispy Skin," and many of the other songs leave their narratives more opaque, open to various interpretations. On "Building 650," the action moves stateside to depict Frank; "We are friends/ There's murder sometimes/ But he's a real nice guy." In a cresting moment of intensity in the otherwise elusive "Blood On The Boulders," Squid repeat the refrain "We return to the scene." That's a manifesto for the album and its constant reminders of warped humanity, from the titular "Cowards" hiding in castle walls, to an eerie voyeurism in "Showtime!" Depravity and violence abound, though rather than a clear fairytale depiction the album almost plays as a mythology about cruelty baked into human DNA.

Though it may seem the sort of peculiar viewpoint only the artist could hold, Cowards does, in some ways, feel more straightforward and accessible than O Monolith. Squid continue to de-emphasize the eruptions and spasms that were once their calling cards, letting these songs subtly twist, unfold, and only occasionally roar. The guitars have become increasingly simmering and serpentine, the structures articulate even in their wandering. On initial listens, Squid's estimation that Cowards is some of their most accessible music may seem laughable, with the punchiness of their earliest material basically eradicated. These songs are carefully crafted vapors; once you wade into them, the hooks and catharses are as unshakeable as ever. They arrive in the swelling horn-and-vocals climax of "Cowards," sounding like a funeral for mankind. They arrive in the malfunctioning machinery of the middle passage in "Showtime!" giving way to a surging denouement that plays like the more mature, shadowy elder brother to the explosive builds of "Narrator" or "Pamphlets."

While Cowards doesn't aim to confound, this is still Squid. Even in boiling down their music to its essence, there are intricately ragged string arrangements and harpsichord cascades. They have pared down and honed in but grown no less adventurous; who knows what instrument creates the hissing insect humidity in the beginning of "Cro Magnon Man," but it has that disorienting quality of a futuristic sound that conjures a near ancient past. They tried to focus on more acoustic instruments, but they still manipulate and chop and loop, relying on sampled timpani in "Showtime!" and bicycle spokes buried in the atmosphere of closer "Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence)." Some of it wilfully ugly, some bizarrely gorgeous, one of the most striking developments of Cowards is Squid perfectly toeing the line between their experimental and approachable sides.

Aside from the sonic differences that always existed between the "Brexit post-punk"/Brixton Windmill/Speedy Wunderground matrix of bands, there's another way Squid stand out from contemporaries like Black Country, New Road or the now-defunct Black Midi. All of them quickly voiced their discomfort at the genre labels and scene narrative placed upon them and fast abandoned anything resembling their original style. You never know what Squid are going to do next, but you never get the sense it's for shock value. Cowards is the sound of a band seamlessly evolving, not having lost what made them exciting in the first place but recalibrating and reimagining it over and over. In some ways, Cowards brings you in faster than the knotty Bright Green Field and O Monolith; in others, it requires patience, inviting you to venture into the ether of the human psyche with the band. To hear Squid tell it, they feel more themselves than ever on this album. And though they have already built up an enviable and rich body of work in the last half decade, the assertion rings true. On Cowards, Squid's world and sound alike open up. It feels as if their story is just getting started.

Cowards is out 2/7 via Warp.

Squid - Cowards [LP]

27.99

Amazon

Other albums of note out this week:
• Sharon Van Etten's Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
• Bartees Strange's Horror
• FACS' Wish Defense
• Oklou's choke enough
• Caroline Rose's Year Of The Slug
• Larry June, 2 Chainz, & The Alchemist's Life Is Beautiful
• Skeleten's Mentalized
• Guided By Voices' Universe Room
• The Convenience's Dub Vultures
• New Orthodox's Bull Market On Corn
• ZelooperZ & Real Bad Man's Dear Psilocybin
• Ben Seretan's astral projecting into flavortown
• Olly Alexander's Polari
• Inhaler's Open Wide
• James Brandon Lewis Trio's Apple Cores
• Sean Thompson’s Weird Ears' Head In The Sand
• Terra Twin's Static Separation
• HONESTY's U R HERE
• Federico Albanese's Blackbirds And The Sun Of October
• Sam Moss' Swimming
• Nadia Reid's Enter Now Brightness
• Dream Theater's Parasomnia
• Heartworms' Glutton For Punishment
• Horsebath's Another Farewell
• Sarah Klang's Beautiful Woman
• Biig Piig's 11:11
• Low Roar's House In The Woods
• Helen Ganya's Share Your Care
• Rats On Rafts' Deep Below
• Gino Vannelli's The Life I Got (To My Most Beloved)
• William Hooker's Jubiliation
• Bjarki's A Guide To Hellthier Lifestyle
• Ian Fisher's Go Gentle
• ameokama's i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening
• Sleeper's Bell's Clover
• Mun Sing's Frolic EP
• Christian Winther's Sculptures From Under The City Ice
• Phrenelith's Ashen Womb
• The Moles' Composition Book
• Obscura's A Sonication
• Matt Pond PA's The Ballad Of The Natural Lines
• Fabiano Do Nascimento's Solstice Concert
• Pit Pony's Dead Stars
• Adwaith's Solas
• Lina Tullgren's Decide Which Way The Eyes Are Looking
• Traxman's Da Mind Of Traxman Vol.3
• Confucius MC & Bastien Keb's Songs For Lost Travellers
• Various artists' Swept Away (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
• Kiran Kai's Ariel Blue
• A.M. Architect's Avenir
• cka FLAX's the birth of fantasy
• The Vices' Before It Might Be Gone
• The Rumjacks' Dead Anthems
• You Ishihara's Passivité
• Jinjer's Duél
• Krept & Konan's Young Kingz II
• Johnnyswim's When The War Is Over
• Majestica's Power Train
• Marko Hietala's Roses From The Deep
• Morast's Fentanyl
• Michigander's Michigander
• Wilder Woods' Wilder Curioso
• Unreqvited's A Pathway To The Moon
• Hella Savage's Not Yet Dead
• Kyle Falconer's The One I Love The Most
• Onilu's Onilu
• Cutouts' Snakeskin
• -(16)-'s Guides For The Misguided
• Maria Teriaeva's Sayan - Savoie
• Christopher Dammann Sextet's Christopher Dammann Sextet
• Gino Vannelli's The Life I Got (To My Most Beloved)
• The White Album's Borders
• Mary Bue's The Wildness Of Living And Dying
• Open Kasket's Trials Of Failure
• Hong Kong Stingray’s The Deepest Shades Of Red (Part 1)
• Joe Ely's Love And Freedom
• Scott Gordon's Metals
• Emergence Collective's Chapel
• Wafia's Promised Land
• Suzzallo's The Quiet Year
• Wilco's A Ghost Is Born 20th Anniversary Box Set
• The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart's Perfect Right Now: A Slumberland Collection 2008 - 2010
• HARDY's HARDY (Live From Red Rocks)
• Various artists' A Tribute To Nirvana, The Songs Of MTV Unplugged In New York
• R.O. Shapiro's The Worthy EP EP
• Ecce Shnak's Shadows Grow Fangs EP
• Roni Lee's FEELS GOOD 2 BE BAD EP