SQUID - Cowards

It was clear from the very first “Bright Green Field” (Warp, 2021) that among all the hot names of the new wave of English post-punk, Squid were the ones bound for the most unpredictable trajectories. So it came as no surprise that the follow-up, “O Monolith” (Warp, 2023), turned out to be a markedly different record from its predecessor, even if it did surprise with the greater roundness of its songs.

Although still faithful to the Brighton band's canon of polyrhythms, post-punk jolts and Warp-house electronic inserts, this third album, “Cowards”, is just as disorienting in the unpredictability of its tracks, be they the most concise or the longest, all capable of taking the listener somewhere they'd least expect.

The opening track, “Crispy Skin”, immediately makes the above point clear. The intro, built on the rhythm of an electronic math rock with an almost circus-like gait, the crackling bass holding up the verses, the guitars growing ever crunchier, and finally a rising finale enriched by piano and brass, all come together into a picture that's downright progressive. In short, the cowards of the title certainly aren't them.

The inventiveness is kept relatively more in check on the following “Building 650”, where Ollie Judge's vocals burst in laden with Radiohead-esque hysteria (link). Even here, though, where you'd expect a booming guitar riff, the quintet opts instead for a far more dramatic string section. Even when the protest song “Blood On The Boulders” grows in intensity and heads into a dissonant post-punk crescendo, the references aren't the ones most in vogue within the genre's current wave — what comes to mind instead are the funk tribalisms of Pop Group.

The two parts of “Fieldworks” strand the record in an atmospheric mid-section, carefully built on interwoven arpeggios and grating strings, but they lack something to make them truly compelling — those details, in short, that are never missing from any other episode of the record. No great loss, though, given the firepower of what follows.

Amid jangling little guitars, electronic swirls and backing choruses, “Cro-Magnon Man” takes us straight to the acid-soaked crossroads between LCD Soundsystem and Viagra Boys. Were they not two purely Squid tracks, the following “Cowards” and “Showtime” would almost seem like gauntlets thrown down to two fellow bands on the scene. The title track lets melancholy and bohemian flavours coexist with a construction and overall vision that Black Country, New Road can only take notes from; while the second is a shapeshifting swoon of alt rock and dance jolts, produced with a rare precision (at the helm, as usual, are Dan Carey and our own Marta Salogni) that puts the recent groovy attempts of Fontaines Dc to shame.

Without the stall that is the aforementioned middle section, we'd be talking about the band's best album yet – a title that for now still belongs to "O Monolith". Still, the constant inventiveness, a cynical yet never hopeless reading of the present, and their apparent inability to put limits on their own ideas all suggest that the best of Squid is yet to come.

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13/02/2025