Album Review: Cowards by Squid

Squid emerge triumphant from the post-punk revival armed with familiar frantic vocals, motorik drums and driving bass, combined with expansive post-rock, electronica, folk and psych, akin to Tortoise, Sufjan Stevens and Warp labelmates Grizzly Bear. The result is exceptional. If there was any doubt before, then it's clear now: Squid have undeniably arrived.

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Cowards is the strongest album Squid has released to date. It feels like a distillation of their nine-year existence into 45-minutes of music. After the swaggering pomp of Bright Green Fields and intricate complexity of O, Monolith, Cowards feels like they've taken a less is more approach. "Crispy Skin" kicks things off in fine form.

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Made up of Louis Borlase, Ollie Judge, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivel and Anton Pearson, Squid began in 2016 as an instrumental jazz band, performing monthly shows in Brighton while living across the Sussex coast. They put their touring plans on hold at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and released their first album, Bright Green Field, in 2021, then followed that up with the aforementioned O Monolith in 2023. Now, with the release of Cowards, their third album in four years, Squid have expanded their sonic palette yet again, delivering an eerie, apocalyptic record that's their most powerful and complex statement to date.

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Discovering a severed ear that would lead him to psychopathic gangster Frank Booth and a whole world of trouble. This exploration of the darker side of human life became a Lynch signature, most starkly realised in Twin Peaks and it's cinematic prequel - where pure evil could be found in almost every corner of the titular town if you looked hard enough. Squid's third album Cowards is fascinated with this idea that evil lives among us, just as humans have been for centuries.

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A testament to artistic ambition, the five-piece’s experimental third effort reveals more of itself with each enchanting listen Squid arrive at their third album a significantly different band than the one that made Bright Green Field, their 2021 debut. Trading unhinged chaos for a more nuanced sound, the Bristol-via-Brighton art-rock quintet has quietly evolved into a mature, sophisticated collective, with their relentless drive to push boundaries culminating brilliantly in Cowards. Gone is the crowded energy of their earlier work; in its place lies a newfound self-confidence and sense of patience that allows Squid to develop their ideas across time and space.

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Flag bearers of the late 2010s post-punk boom, a band who have thus far managed to transcend the transience of trend and become an increasingly timeless and global-facing artistic voice, Squid's third album sees the outfit doubling down on what are now such recognisably "Squid-like" sensibilities that it no longer resembles anything else but them. That is: irremediably deep-set anxieties about modern dystopia and a sense of incipient apocalypse; Ollie Judge's prophetic, baleful moans; an angular, fingers-against-the-chalkboard production, so close, edgy and organic it scratches against your vertebrae like barbed wire. For a band who have rarely sounded far from the tipping point of crippling dread, it now seems a natural move for them to produce a record literally inspired by evil itself.

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At the tail-end of the 2010s, Squid emerged alongside Black Midi and Black Country, New Road as part of a golden trifecta for the iconoclastic South London singles label Speedy Wunderground. A real revitalising moment for British guitar music, this trio of spookily young groups combined virtuous musicality with a diverse and incongruous canon of influences to make some of the most exciting and experimental rock music seen on these shores for generations. Helmed by singing drummer Ollie Judge, Squid were among the most explosive live prospects in the country, and the group quickly accumulated a devoted following for their eternal, yearning space jams that crash-landed somewhere between the in-vogue post-punk of their contemporaries and the very best cosmic rock of 70s Canterbury and Cologne.

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Googling "Squid" would would bring up dozens of photos and videos (including this--oh my!) of octopuses, cuttlefishes, and other types of cephalopods. Or--to the well-known Netflix series. Young lads born and bred on the internet obviously knew that if you want to be found and widely recognized, it's always better to come up with a more fun and remarkable name--like Viagra Boys, Mannequin Pussy, or Feeble Little Horse.

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