Like a surveillance drone pulling away from Earth, Squid songs tend to have a queasy kind of overview effect, a sense of seeing and feeling too much all at once. The five-piece is among the most experimental new voices to emerge in British guitar music in the 2020s, and on Cowards, Squid’s third album in only four years for Warp, they cast their gaze wider than ever. Their 2021 debut LP, Bright Green Field, was a frothy-mouthed post-punk diatribe against capitalist drudgery and Britain’s slide into far-right politics. The jazzier, looser 2023 follow-up O Monolith cast a wider net, placing the visceral moment of Bright Green Field in its broader social context, engulfing topics such as police brutality, ancient British folklore, and the UK’s relationship with rats.
Cowards could be seen as the final instalment in a twisted trilogy: This time, Squid zoom out even further, taking as their subject matter evil itself. Looking well beyond the immediate UK context, here their kaleidoscopic post-rock refracts all the ugliest impulses of humanity—cowardice, apathy, greed, and bloodlust. Lead singer and percussionist Ollie Judge has described the record as “like a book of dark fairytales.” By turns ominous and luxurious, it’s the band’s most restlessly expansive listen yet.
Squid songs tend to have a metamorphic energy, beginning life as one thing before impishly transforming into something else entirely. On Cowards, this shape-shifting sensibility is more alive than ever: “Blood on the Boulders,” a tale about the Manson murders, is a quintessential example, veering between discordant, rapturous screams and a cloying whisper that sits on the skin like California heat. On the dyad of “Fieldworks I” and “Fieldworks II,” a whimsical processed harpsichord provides a direct juxtaposition to percussion that ticks like a clock, generating an enveloping sense of dread.
In most of these songs, Judge’s lyrics foreground an antihero: a brutish, Old Testament God-style figure who acts as a counterpoint to the music’s mischievousness. “Building 650” dovetails a playful guitar lick with the story of Frank, a “nice guy” yet very bad man who the narrator cannot bring himself to cut ties with. Meanwhile, over beautifully coruscating synths, “Crispy Skin” tells the story of a living in a society driven to cannibalism (“It’s become so easy,” Judge 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 figure who promises to make you a footnote in his story. Embodying this sinister character, Judge’s vocals prowl, dark and low like smoke, over the funhouse mirror surface of glitching electronics and juddering strings.
These sonic tricks are not the only way that Squid pull the rug on their listeners. “Blood on the Boulders” is not simply about the Manson murders, we see as its gaze pulls back, but about our voyeuristic fascination with true crime. With densely layered vocals, the song’s nightmarish climax repeats, “We return to the scene/We return to the scene” ad nauseam; many are implicated in that “we,” no single voice identifiable in the throng. “Building 650” is not so much about the sins of Frank as about the friend who is too cowardly to confront him for them; on “Crispy Skin,” the horror isn’t in the visceral descriptions of eating people as much as in the normalization of that grisly diet. The permeable, slippery nature of Squid’s sound mirrors their subject matter: Evil isn’t necessarily some monstrous figure, nor even something that is always obviously sinister, but something that lives invisibly inside and among us all.
Judge’s lyrics, like those of some of Squid’s key influences, David Byrne and Thom Yorke, take the form of collages. On Cowards he depicts the banality of evil by placing everyday images right next to obscene ones. He depicts a blood-spattered desert boulder beside never-decaying plastic bags; the raw horror of cannibalism beside the uncanniness of a skyscraper with all its lights turned on. Climate anxiety looms throughout; it comes to a head on the album closer “Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence),” a queasy fable about apathy in the face of a dying planet that’s set to the manic, dizzying swell of a harpsichord, the clattering of bike spokes, and the mournful cry of a flugelhorn. “The future’s perfect/From the backseat,” Judge snarls in the final line, taking direct aim at the passivity steering us all into a terrifying future. It’s the perfect sign-off to what’s both Squid’s most wide-ranging album yet, and somehow still the one that hits closest to home.
