Listening to Squid’s first full-length album is like taking a drive through England: lengthy stretches of undulating green, sometimes interrupted by noisy concrete towns and frenzied cities. But bucolic charm is nowhere to be found. On ‘Bright Green Field’ – a suitably incongruous title from a band who are never quite what they seem – the only brightness comes from glaring anger and a disconcerting sense of change.
Squid have always stayed wise to the insanity of modern, mundane life. “This is my beautiful house and I can’t afford to live in it!”, singer-drummer Oliver Judge exclaimed on their 2019 EP ‘Town Centre’. Formed in Brighton in 2017, the band are now based in London, with Speedy Wunderground producer Dan Carey on board. They share the restlessness of contemporaries like black midi and Black Country, New Road, but that rigid post-punk sound is just one part of the band’s sonic sprawl.
You can trace a line back through LCD Soundsystem and Talking Heads, and a million other artists besides, but what Squid do with their influences is more interesting. Discordant grooves, squeaks, and yelps are repurposed for today’s England, and bees and church bells open an album that clashes rural with urban, offline with online, luring modern and pastoral England together to do battle.
Squid tread a strange psychogeography across ‘Bright Green Field’. Neon rental bikes, netted buildings, and a “concrete island” populate ‘G.S.K’, the creative crux of the album, written by Judge after a moment of grim Ballardian inspiration on a Megabus outside pharma-giant GlaxoSmithKline’s HQ.
Brass interlude ‘Flyover’ steers into the space-age motorway of ‘Peel St.’ and its splashy percussion. Meanwhile, out in the suburbs, ‘Boy Racers’ screech up and down your peaceful cul-de-sac, as your letterbox spits endless advertising ‘Pamphlets’: “open wide, we’ve got everything, everything you like”.
But despite the obvious, alarmed digs at consumerism and capitalism, the album’s drive seems musical rather than political. Several of its eleven tracks near the ten-minute mark, yet never find a second of respite, forever braced for the next nervy outburst of jazz, punk, or industrial rock.
Braced for anything, really. ‘Boy Racers’ abruptly descends from frenzied guitar into slow, extra-terrestrial synth – like Doctor Who mowing the lawn – a sound generated by a medieval wind ‘rackett’. Sometimes, the band fall into weirdly normal James-esque indie melodies. Other times, Judge’s vocal squall is too abrasive, softened only by humour – the wry banal mantras of ‘Paddling’, for example – or by Martha Skye Murphy’s superb guest whispers and howls on ‘Narrator’. You sort of want her to permanently join the band.
“It’s a grower,” said Judge’s mother upon hearing Squid’s new album. When your own mum – your unconditional number one fan – doesn’t immediately think your work is the bees’ knees, you’ve probably made something unique. Squid have no need for affection. They challenge and toy with their audience, an approach that will win friends and enemies alike. Their ‘Bright Green Field’ is yours for the pillaging: it’s up to you to seek out any treasure within its acres.
