Since their inception in 2016, Squid have been pioneers: their 2021 debut Bright Green Field was lauded as an immaculate, capricious and frenetic masterpiece, while 2023’s follow-up O Monolith continued to successfully sculpture their sonic landscape. On Cowards, the band’s third album in less than five years, Squid make a bold, sprawling statement on where they are now and where they will go next, enlisting new collaborators to bring a fresh approach to their already multi-dimensional sound.
‘Crispy Skin’ opens the album on a startlingly uncomfortable note: angular guitar accompanies dynamic musical shifts which place the listener immediately on edge, demanding engagement and defying expectations. The song’s lyrical content is unsettling, too: allusions to cannibalism abound, references which vocalist and drummer Ollie Judge has stated were inspired by Tender Is The Flesh, a dystopian novel written by Agustina Bazterrica which portrays a society that normalises and commercialises the manufacture and consumption of human meat. As the song fades out to a cacophony of brass and strings, Judge repeats the line “The blood drips, drips faster than you can think”, contributing to a creepily claustrophobic atmosphere which recurs as the album progresses.
Continuing the literary influences across Cowards, ‘Building 650’ retells the abstruse plot of Ryu Murakami’s In the Miso Soup, while sustaining and developing the string-speckled instrumentation of ‘Crispy Skin’, taking this to soaring new heights. ‘Blood on the Boulders’ follows, beginning in a hushed manner but building to become expansive and eventually explosive, employing sharp percussion and an ascendant piano riff as it reaches crescendo.
‘Fieldworks I’ brings a brief moment of ethereal beauty amongst the chaos, before its successor ‘Fieldworks II’ opens with the ticking of a clock and a plea from Judge to “remind me I’m evil too”. ‘Cro-Magnon Man’, the album’s third and final single, brings Cowards to its halfway point and falls directly in the middle of the two inceptions of Black Country, New Road: it features the noisy experimentation of For the first time, while also hinting at the melodic beauty of the newly-reformed sextet’s recent releases.
Title track ‘Cowards’ exhibits the band’s typically abstract lyricism, and returns to the calm serenity of ‘Fieldworks II’. This doesn’t last long, however, as ‘Showtime!’ is up there with Squid’s most upbeat, danceable tracks, creating a dissonance that simultaneously jolts and stimulates the listener. The song is subtly laced with the strings of prior tracks, and wouldn’t sound out of place on Radiohead’s In Rainbows: for this, Squid can thank previous Jonny Greenwood collaborators The Ruisi Quartet for providing the violin, viola, and cello that contribute to a deceptively bright sound across the album. Throughout ‘Showtime!’, a jangling bassline courtesy of Laurie Nankivell complements the arresting guitar of fellow band members Louis Borlase and Anton Pearson, leaving little question that this will prove one of many live highlights on Squid’s February UK tour.
Squid have often taken a collaborative approach to their material, most notably on 2021’s thunderous ‘Narrator’, which features Martha Skye Murphy. This time around, they introduce more new voices, and to great effect too. ‘Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence)’ is as close to perfect as an album can get, including multiple background vocalists to provide a moment of finality as Cowards reaches its conclusion. The song’s composition is akin to that of Kate Bush’s ‘Army Dreamers’, replacing the claustrophobia of previous tracks with spellbinding, atmospheric sonic textures.
In a way, Cowards also mirrors Bush’s storytelling abilities: although they began as an instrumental jazz band, Squid have proven time and again that they are capable of weaving elaborate narratives within their songs, while retaining the musical experimentation that continues to cement them as a firm favourite of the post-punk and art-rock scenes. Every element of Cowards deserves, and demands, attention, and many a long essay could be written on its various intertwining yet dissonant components: this is a record which is impossible to summarise, inherently refusing to be compartmentalised.
From beginning to end, Cowards is both pulsing and propulsive, utilising sudden bursts of distortion throughout to unsettle, disconcert, and disorientate. The Brighton quintet’s third album welcomes listeners into its world, but makes clear that nothing is as it seems as it relates its tales of human evil. Dynamic, ever-shifting instrumentation and obscure lyricism combine to form a distinctively dense, impressively intricate body of work, while the preternatural complexity that arises provides Cowards with a strong case for being Squid’s best yet. The album will be released on the 7 February via Squid’s long-time label Warp Records, and the band are due to perform at Manchester’s O2 Ritz on the 18 February .
