More about: Squid

After the hype generating watertight live performances on KEXP last year, (RYM’s top video of 2022!) Squid's much awaited sophomore album secures their reputation as one of the most accomplished and daring bands on the UK scene. 

Let’s get it out of the way - Squid are inextricably linked with Black Country, New Road and Black Midi, coming up in the post-punk revival of the late 2010s and the turn of the 2020s. Unlike the vaudeville rock opera of Hellfire, or the yearning, romantic emo of Ants From Up There. O Monolith is the younger sibling who followed a rabbit in the woods expecting to find wonderland and ended up in The Wicker Man. The record pulls off an impressive feat: it’s a dense, richly textured album constantly shifting between genres & influences which succeeds in feeling spacious rather than cramped.

"O Monolith is drenched with anxiety and tension"

Overall, O Monolith is drenched with anxiety and tension, and yet as soon as A Swing (In a Dream) begins, warbling synths unfold into a King Gizz adjacent serotonin overload. Lyrically, the album kicks off with abstraction 'the wire's within the string/ from rubble to my dream… Rococo curves you soothe me'.  Fragonard’s The Swing is cited by Ollie Judge as the inspiration for the chorus of the album’s lead single ‘Swing (In a Dream)’.  A charge levied against works from the Rococo era of painting is their detachment and florid excess, the dreamy pastoral image is a thick cushion over the latent anxiety in the record. The first few tracks are sugarcoated by this King Gizz adjacent lysergic serotonin bliss sound. This is a floaty opener - and for the first half a minute, it sounds a bit alt. Are we allowed to say that in 2023? No, wait. Political nihilism, saxophones and a breakdown section which brings a record out of the toothless, Blair era 'alternative' sound and back into the present day UK's self-aware political decay in the slow boil anthropocene (phew).

It feels fitting that one of the top comments on Squid’s recently released lead single 'The Blades' is "I couldn’t have started reading The Pale King at a better time". 'The Blades' expresses the reality of the deadened bureaucratic hellscape in the pissing black monotony of a city on the edge of ruin. The six and a half minute, multi stage romp through anger ends on the gently and vulnerably delivered doomer lyrics "I spin, I dive, I whirl around I sleep; trying, at least / The city burns, The blades turn". 

"On O Monolith, Squid demonstrate that they are firmly in control of both tension and catastrophe." 

Elements of British Folk find their way onto the record, with Squid giving a nod to Shirley Collins' influence on the woodwind section in Devil's Den.  A sleeper, but this track may be the most beguiling on O Monolith. Into the rabbit hole, opens in a haze - meditative, slow and swampy.  Judge sings "Vinegar tongue.. Am I a fool, tempting you?" and flirtation is ushered in. With a hint of Jethro Tull’s in the flutes, the track escapes being carried away by proggy twee, the scene shifts too quickly. One of this album’s great strengths is the seamless and unforced genre hopping, it seems to integrate the refracted attention span of the (self confessed) tiktok era listener. In the second half of the track, there’s a self conscious nod in guitar riff to 953 from Schlagenheim, which from there aptly descends into controlled mania. On O Monolith, Squid demonstrate that they are firmly in control of both tension and catastrophe. 

'Siphon’s Song' feels like a much needed breather after the sheer amount of terrain covered in the first two tracks - the android Daft punky vocals are playful and hang well beside the strung out instrumentation. After the Flash is the strongest track on the album lyrically and has the most delicate instrumentation; "demonic faces, the lap me up, they spit me out… my smile fades quicker than it’s made". It sits on the later half of the album, seeming to occupy a similar spiraling and understated position to 'Sun in my Mouth on Vespertine'.  A choral interlude grows and ascends into a dissociative dream, Judge sings of parlour games - the album is situated in this English whimsy. Recorded partially in Peter Gabriel’s studios in Wiltshire, dreamy pastoral creeps into the work alongside the mounting climate anxiety. As the breakdown sets in, this track feels like being trapped in a ketamine laced nitrous canister on a too bright afternoon at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. 'After the Flash' then closes with what sounds like a ruined orgasm, which sets us up for the closing track which has a similarly muted finish. As 'After the Flash' crashes down, we’re left with birdsong.

Sampling birdsong roots the album in the natural world, giving it a sense of place beyond the cloistered clusterfuck of post-punk London.  O Monolith distinguishes itself from other releases in the 2020s post-punk revival by drawing on these natural, atmospheric and whimsical natural soundscapes without getting caught in the same navel gazing whimsy that makes prog despicably esoteric and unbearable. “There’s an intensity to Dan’s recordings that works really well, and John added a spacious, natural sound alongside that,” explains trumpet player ​​Laurie Nankivell. Squid make gestures towards ecology without losing their edge by refusing to fetishise the soundscapes of the English countryside. 

The helicopter trackpad sounds and rhythmic whispers on the closer track 'If You Had Seen The Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away' melt into a deeply satisfying interplay between densely layered melodies. It’s an offbeat, satisfying-because-it’s-frustrating closer track, an exercise in tease and denial with a knowingly premature end.

In this record, Squid lean away from having even a foot and a half in post punk, treading into murkier and dreamier genre-flipping territory, and drummer vocalist Ollie Judge pivots away from his David Byrne inspired delivery towards melodic vulnerability. 'Green Light' and 'Undergrowth' cover the best trodden and therefore least interesting ground, perhaps but too easily intelligible when placed against the experiments across the rest of the record. It's rightfully earned confidence which allows Squid not to rely on violent breakdown in order to give release to the tension they build throughout the record.

'Narrator', from Bright Green Field continues to be a banger, but I'm glad Squid don't feel like they have to do scream-breakdowns like this in O Monolith. Squid’s sophomore album is a real treat, a truly collaborative approach to composition creates a dense and rich texture which strongly rewards playing on repeat. 

Grab your copy of the Gigwise print magazine here.

More about: Squid