Life on the road has shaped Squid’s worldview – and worldbuilding – but they won’t write a song about touring. Not exactly. The way it’s broadened their perspective bleeds through the characters, settings, and influences behind the art-rockers’ third album, Cowards, which pares down the knotty textures of 2023’s O Monolith. It begins as a relatively straightforward, or straightforwardly manic, catalog of evil, but its framework slowly becomes more slippery, oblique, and widely evocative. It’s unhinged and prickly, like trying to pick the salt out of the ocean, before zooming out and plunging in. “And we just play our songs/ To the sea,” Ollie Judge sings on the very last song, suddenly shifting the gaze back to the group, or society as a whole. “And hope that nothing comes/ And washes us away.”
1. Crispy Skin
As I write this, a copy of Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, Ollie Judge’s primary inspiration for ‘Crispy Skin’, sits on my bookshelf. I haven’t read it, but I know it’ll make me squirm, and the opening track on Cowards should elicit the same reaction. It imagines a future where cannibalism has become the norm, though Judge cannily makes no distinction between human and non-human flesh; we just assume it’s the first because the tone the band sets, taking sonic cues from Phillip Glass, is one of dystopian horror. Judge zones in on a single individual beginning to question the ethics of what’s been widely normalized: “Am I the bad one? Yep, yes I am,” he sings, yet quickly jerks any thought of immoral complacency away. As the rest of the group joins him towards the end, the I of the chorus and the we of the verses morph into one. Only during the outro do we get a bird’s eye view of the suffering itself: “The blood drips, drips faster than you can think.”
2. Building 650
On the opener, complacency is government-sanctioned and socially incentivized; on ‘Building 650’, it’s a matter of friendship. “There’s murder sometimes,” Judge concedes, “But he’s a real nice guy.” This track was inspired by Judge reading Ryu Murikami’s The Miso Soup by Ryu Murikami and watching Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation on the plane during the band’s first visit to Japan; in response, the band lays a gauzy, even hollow sense of displacement over their typically propulsive sense of dread. If nothing else, the driving interplay between the guitar and strings is proof of the band’s more classically rock inclinations throughout Cowards.
3. Blood on the Boulders
The album’s third track is the moment you realize Squid really aren’t overcomplicating things musically; it’s also the point on the album where the lyrics become more elusive, the reference points less overt. It’s easy to read it as being about society’s obsession with true crime, or about tourism, which turns violent with each repetition of “We return to the scene”; yet the scene, or destination, is either irrelevant or open to interpretation. It fashions one of Squid’s most enticingly lurching and simple grooves, erupting, like ‘Crispy Skin’, when the group vocals come along.
4. Fieldworks I
If the majority of Cowards comes from a place of anger, ‘Fieldworks I’ identifies the point where resentment starts to fester. The harpsichord and string arrangement lend a different flavor to the band’s anxious disposition, urgung listeners to lean in. It really makes sense as the genesis of the LP.
5. Fieldworks II
The use of the harpsichord over guitar, on which the main part of the song was written, is the biggest link between this and the first part of piece; it makes sense that the band split it into two. The track unfurls with great deliberation; the percussion sounds sturdy and resonant at one point, almost glitching into the abyss at others – a nimbleness Squid usually reserve for their melodic structures. When Judge returns to the theme of self-proclaimed and collective evil (“I’m evil too”) it sounds more forlorn this time, it sounds more forlorn and human. Desensitization leads to depersonalization, loss of memory becomes loss of self. Here, Squid stare into the fog.
6. Cro-Magnon Man
“Guilt is cold sweat in a box” is one of the most potent lines on the album, and Squid do a captivating job of encapsulating it on ‘Cro-Magnon Man’. It’s a fitting return to the twitchy, claustrophobic sound the band has become associated with, only the framework has shifted, diluting the boundaries between predator and prey, primitive and modern. Another great closing line: “I’ll frame my life in the bones that I have left.” So Squid keeps things skeletal – or rather, brittled-down.
7. Cowards
The title track of Squid’s third album is a statement of composure: if you’ve known this band as young masters of jittery grooves and intensity, you can’t possibly keep them in the same box after spending the better part of this album hearing them meld plaintive melodies and misty orchestration. The title track maintains the curiously melancholic mood that pervades the album’s second half; the band could’ve made the horns sound triumphant, but instead they’re wistful and inquisitive, twinged with a little bit of hope. “Us dogs and rats will never escape,” Judge concludes, though visitors, some less innocent than others, will come and go. Still, his fantasies once again take over the song’s outro – just less bloody this time.
8. Showtime!
The eerie, mournful quietude of the album is disrupted on ‘Showtime!’, a penultimate track that delivers a much-needed jolt of twisted, nervy energy. “I resist the urge/ Of a quiet life,” the voyeuristic protagonist declares, and the band animates his resistance with instrumentation that’s at once thrillingly funky and hellish. Apparently, it’s a song Judge wrote about Andy Warhol after listening to a podcast about his exploitative practices. Checks out: “You could be my angel star/ You could be my footnote,” he sings, a perfectly biting couplet.
9. Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence)
Squid have made a great number of songs that unsettle, expand, and explode; few are quite as stirring as this eight-minute epic. Thematically, it would be an astounding closer on most albums; what better way to end the record than to cast oblivion – off? away? the right phrasal verb slips right through – as an ocean of beauty? Clarissa Connelly’s voice is a hopeful foil to Judge’s end-of-times melancholy, the ether to his obliterated ground. What he sees is a great blur, tightening around us and constantly transforming. From the backseat, he can’t help but take it all in.