Squid follow up their debut with ‘O Monolith’
The band explore their sound further on their second album.
Photo: Alex Kurunis
After much anticipation, this weekend sees the release of Squid’s sophomore album, O Monolith, two years after their extremely well-received debut album Bright Green Field. Known for their deeply layered, tricky and emotionally tightly packed music, what can the Brighton post-punk five-piece bring to the table the second time around?
Squid attributes a significant part of the stylistic direction of O Monolith to the journey of its creation itself. “We were quite keen on pushing ourselves musically in a way that was a reaction against what we’d done before,” states guitarist Louis Borlase. “So we were playing elements of Bright Green Field alongside quite free explorations of all these new ideas.” Squid found influence within the environment around them, going so far as to include field recordings from the area around the studio. There’s a running theme of the relation of people to the environment throughout,” continues Louis. “There are allusions to the world we became so immersed in, environmental emergency, the role of domesticity, and the displacement you feel when you’re away for a long time.”
O Monolith quickly establishes itself as a much friendlier piece compared to its predecessor Bright Green Field; the themes of abstractness and density have lingered into this album, but the band have leashed it and harnessed its power into something warmer and even soothing when listening to this release with the right balance of emotions. When listening to this you can appreciate the way Squid find a way to pull out the feeling of tranquillity from a sea of unrest and uncertainty.
The album begins with the already released single Swing (In a Dream). In many ways, it is the perfect beginning for the story that Squid wish to tell through the album, if not so directly. Starting slowly, calmly and organised as the intro develops itself, it slowly becomes more unraveled and messy, until it suddenly completely sullies with the hectic howls of a brass section coming in. It changes the calm complexity of the song to something darker and almost unrecognisable from where it began. Lead vocalist and drummer Ollie Judge remarked he was inspired to write this song after a dream involving “The Swing” by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Ollie explains, “In my dream, I was in the painting but it was flooded and everything was floating away”. The shift from almost charming order to fearful anarchy in the composition of the song captures what the feeling must have been so well.
Green Light is a personal favourite for me, sticking out the most on every listen. Starting relatively slowly — with some slower riffs backed by field recordings of birds around the studio — Green Light takes no time in quickly entrapping you with its chaotic high energy. The song blurs the lines between the ideas from Bright Green Fields and their new direction very noticeably here; the feral-like guitar chords and the vehemence of Ollie Judge’s vocal display are something to behold. Almost just as this level of emotion is released, however, the track slowly manages to drift off back into the abyss of silence, having used all its power. Every single listen reveals another crevice of emotion and meaning I was allowed to explore — as songs go it is quite the experience.
The album ends on the mouthful that is If You Had Seen The Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away. It’s wonderfully melodic, if not almost uneasy at times with its introductory whispering session and high-pitched guitar strings making their way throughout the verses. In places it almost feels like the Gregorian chant of the post-punk sound, the backing vocals almost treating this as Squid’s hymn to bow out with.
O Monolith is quite clearly an evolution in the sound of Squid; they’ve moved from the shackles of more stereotypical post-punk sounds and have become significantly more experimental, almost to the point of accepting the free-flow of their sound as opposed to a more traditional manufacturing of it. It’s going to take a few listens to appreciate the wonderful job Squid have done (to be able to pick out the joy from the madness).
O Monolith is out now via Warp Records.
