Squid get evil for killer new album: 'It's dark and grisly, but still funny'

Evil is everywhere. This much we gather from the little Ouija boards we cling to in our hands. In one form or another, evil is ever more present to us. Weirdly, it is also a highly accessible listen, hook-laden among the meat hooks, and has a certain slippery and sly intent that makes it feel very of the moment. Musicians have always worked to make people dance to the darkness and Cowards is essentially a collection of fables and murder ballads for the digital era.

Not that it was particularly intended as some grand statement. Squid appear to be a band who combine an obsessive attention to detail with a punkish, Puck-ish intuition. “The music we were writing was quite whimsical in places,” drummer and singer Ollie Judge tells the Standard, “So I wanted to do lyrics that were the complete opposite of that. A bit grisly and dark, but still funny.”. Well indeed. The name of that cannibalism song? ‘Crispy Skin’. Which does turn out to be a lot more fun than any song about a dystopian human-eating world has any right to be.

This is because Squid have hit a new level of songwriting that takes you by the hand and takes you off to a carnival sideshow. The song, like another lead-off single Building 360, shows these post-punksters are no such thing; how would you describe them now? Neu! meets Love meets The Smiths meets Throbbing Gristle? But how to explain the harpsichord. Is this chamber music for the apocalypse?. I mean, who knows? Cowards is damn good though.

“It’s quite an intense relationship,” says guitarist Louis Borlase, which also features Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson, with the way they write sounding like a therapy session mixed with a science experiment: “You're always chucking in ideas and each member is adding new things. We have a lot of obsessions and fads. It's ultimately just a reflection of everyone's personality.

There's childish excitement in the band, but also deeper principles. There's quite a lot of us, it's never gonna be someone's baby. You can’t get attached to things, they can go in the bin. But it’s only with time that you can look back and be like, this was so right.”. Sounds like it’s quite full on, though Borlase says what they were trying for with this one was, “restraint… playing with space and silence.”.

Thus far the band has certainly not been associated with restraint. Squid are from Bristol but first came to wider attention as part of the scene that emerged from The Windmill pub in Brixton. Black Midi and Black Country, New Road were the other cult acts that spring from it, and none of them were about holding back; this was music as art-rock buffet food fight: The Fall, Sonic Youth, prog-rock, krautrock, all the noisy lot.

Black Midi were probably the most likely to be big timers, but have now split. Instead, it’s Squid that have emerged from the chaos in the rudest health, with Cowards marking a definite new level for them. It’s confident and complete, with a serious literary sensibility wrapping around it. “I was using these books about evil people as springboards to make my own narratives,” says Judge, ‘Like Crispy Skin is influenced by a book called Tender Is the Flesh [by Agustina Bazterrica], which has an alternative reality where cannibalism is completely normal, it's just like going to KFC.

And then there’s a great dark fairy tale called Lapvona [by Ottessa Moshfegh] that I was reading at the time. It’s darkly comic. That inspired some of the evil-er kind of stories. I think the idea of fables is a very exciting way to kind of embed existing literary influences into your music and kind of regurgitate it as something that's your own. It's exciting for us because we've never taken it that far.”.

It certainly does get under your (crispy) skin. Building 650 pictures a man adrift and alone in Tokyo, falling in with the wrong crowd: ‘Frank’s my friend/He’s my friend/We are friends/There’s murder sometimes/But he’s a real nice guy.’. On the allegorical Cowards, all distorted jazz, twisted brass and fairytale dread, Judge sings, ‘Polythene bags they’ll never go away/Us dogs and rats will never escape/If you said it could be better I probably won’t believe you/I’ll knock the teeth out of my head’.

It’s inspired by the film Dogtooth, and sounds like the unknown younger brother of Radiohead escaped from a basement and finding a box of matches. Other highlights include Blood on the Boulders, which reimagines the Manson Family as content creators, and new single Cro-Magnon Man, with sung by Borgase with the help of uber-cool musicians Tony Njoku and Clarissa Connelly, which may be the most unhinged single of the year, a kind of trip into modern hell also written by Borgase, and based on a disturbing children’s book about death that his grandmother gave him. It ends with the line: ‘I’ll frame my life in the bones that I have left.’ Well, you do you.