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SQUID

Squid

Cowards

    Squid’s new album Cowards is about evil. Nine stories whose protagonists reckon with cults, charisma and apathy. Real and imagined characters wading into the dark ocean between right and wrong.

    Cowards is Squid’s most courageous album: simultaneously growing in scope and returning to basics. The band recorded Cowards at Church Studios in Crouch End with Mercury prize winning producers Marta Salogni and Grace Banks. On additional production is longtime shifu and collaborator Dan Carey, who recorded the band’s first two albums. The record was mixed in Seattle by John McEntire, before being compressed by the rich analogue chain of Heba Kadry’s mastering in Brooklyn, New York.

    Squid have come a long way since forming in 2016 as an instrumental jazz band for a monthly night in Brighton. Their debut album Bright Green Field (2021) arrived as the world was starting to open up after the pandemic and they broke into the top 5 in the UK chart. In 2023 they released their sophomore album, the brooding O Monolith, which took the band all over the world and broke new ground that hardly seemed possible years prior.

    TRACK LISTING

    Crispy Skin
    Building 650
    Blood On The Boulders
    Fieldworks I
    Fieldworks II
    Cro-Magnon Man
    Cowards
    Showtime!
    Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence)

    Deluxe Edition 10" Bonus Tracks:
    Phenomenal World
    Crispy Skin
    The Hearth And Circle Round Fire

    Squid

    O Monolith

      Teeming with melodic epiphanies and layered sounds, Squid’s second album O Monolith is a musical evocation of environment, domesticity and self-made folklore. Like its predecessor, 2021’s critically acclaimed, UK number 4 album Bright Green Field, it is dense and tricksy – but also more warm and characterful, with a meandering, questioning nature.

      Expansive, evocative and hugely varied, O Monolith retains Squid’s restless, enigmatic spirit, but it still holds surprises for those familiar with Bright Green Field. It’s a reflection of the outsized progression of a band always looking to the future. Like its namesake, O Monolith is vast and strange; alive with endless possible interpretations of its inner mysteries.


      STAFF COMMENTS

      Will says: The Oxford English dictionary defines ‘squid’ as “an elongated, fast-swimming cephalopod mollusc with eight arms and two long tentacles, typically able to change colour”, which is about as appropriate a definition as any to tack onto this eclectic collection of manic yet thoughtful pieces of music. ‘O Monolith’ is some other dimension’s version of pop music - an honest and unrelenting synthesis of the haunting art, isolation and real-world brutality that inspired it, an earworm that nests itself only in the most obscure recesses of your mind. It would be fit to feature in any year-end list on the strength of bombastic lead single and opener “‘Swing (In a Dream)” alone, but the contemplative “The Blades” and the mind-bending closer with a title that would exceed my world limit, to name a couple, as well as how smoothly the album flows, cement this record’s place as a truly original modern classic.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Swing (In A Dream)
      2. Devil’s Den
      3. Siphon Song
      4. Undergrowth
      5. The Blades
      6. After The Flash
      7. Green Light
      8. If You Had Seen The Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away

      If the album’s title conjures tranquil melodies evoking some misty pastoral idyll, that impression isn't immediately dispelled by the dark rock ambience of opener “Resolution Square”. That is abruptly followed, however, by a series of dystopian dreams strewn across a bed of staccato post punk-funk with more in common with The Fall, Gang Of Four and punk cacophony than Vivaldi. There isn’t necessarily a single coherent centre to the album, either musically or thematically, both subject matter and genre co-opted and discarded with abandon, but there is an obvious dig at cold corporate capitalism in “G.S.K.”, inspired by the monolithic slab that is GlaxoSmithKline’s HQ in Brentford and “Global Groove”, a swipe at the detachment of newscast war voyeurism. Alongside these Bright Green Fields presents clipped portraits of modern life’s grinding banality, but it really needs to be experienced as a whole to appreciate its exquisitely crafted and well targeted power. 


      STAFF COMMENTS

      Barry says: I can't think of a single band that sound like Squid. Four or five maybe, but no other single band could sound this varied, this coherently i'm sure of it. Meandering math-rock, snarling post-punk and arrythmic indie business coalesce into a wildly inventive and completely unique whole. Staggeringly brilliant.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Resolution Square
      2. G.S.K.
      3. Narrator Ft. Martha Skye Murphy
      4. Boy Racers
      5. Paddling
      6. Documentary Filmmaker
      7. 2010
      8. The Flyover
      9. Peel St.
      10. Global Groove
      11. Pamphlets

      Squid

      Near The Westway (RSD21 EDITION)

        THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2021 EXCLUSIVE AND WILL BE AVAILABLE INSTORE ON SATURDAY JULY 17TH ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVED BASIS, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

        IF THERE ARE ANY REMAINING COPIES THEY WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE ONLINE AT 6PM ON THE SAME DAY (SATURDAY JULY 17TH).


        Live To Vinyl Exclusive


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