Squid entered into sessions for a third album keen to switch things up. The quintet’s second record O Monolith, released in 2023, was a dizzying blur of jerky art rock, prog-tinged folk, and eerie, experimentalist jazz, but things settle down a little on the startling Cowards. “We did want to simplify some aspects of this record,” says drummer and vocalist Ollie Judge. “That was kind of a springboard to focus a bit more on classic-y songwriting.” It has resulted in a record that feels like one the band has been building up to since they first emerged in the latter half of the last decade, where the thrilling alchemy of their playing locks into something more mesmeric. In streamlining their sound, Squid sound more powerful than ever with Cowards taking in hypnotic, motorik grooves, choral folk, epic bursts of strings, and propulsive, minor-chord rock. It is the work of a band realizing that less is more. “Doing something slightly more melodic and expansive was definitely something we had in mind,” adds guitarist Louis Borlase. “[During the songwriting process] we were kind of riding the wave and we didn’t have to stop and look around as much to make active decisions on how to let a certain idea come and go. It did feel like stuff was happening by itself. I think it’s the best record we’ve made.” Let Judge, Borlase, and bassist Laurie Nankivell guide you through Cowards, track by track. “Crispy Skin” Laurie Nankivell: “The working title for this was ‘Glass’ because we talked about how the opening keyboard lines had this slightly classic minimalist feel of a two-hand counterpoint that I think a lot of us are inspired [by] from the work of Philip Glass.” Ollie Judge: “I think this track shows the more chamber kind of feel to the record, with piano and acoustic instruments looking to set the stage. Lyrically, it’s just the same old dark stuff. It’s about cannibalism and an alternate reality where evil acts like that are normalized—and whether or not anyone could have such a strong moral compass not to indulge in things that are so widely normalized.” “Building 650” Louis Borlase: “This is one of the only tracks we’ve released which is under four minutes and that’s representative of the fact we wrote it quite quickly. It’d be nice if that happened more regularly. Sadly, it’s not the case.” OJ: “I remember we were doing some writing at our friend’s studio in Bristol and Jim Barr, who was Portishead’s touring bassist and is a man of few words, came in and said that ‘Building 650’ sounded like the bastard love child of Sonic Youth and Led Zeppelin. I see where he’s coming from.” “Blood on the Boulders” LN: “We started writing in a really nice cosy studio in really far-out East London called Arcus Sounds, run by two really nice friends. It’s a nice immersive room and you forget about your industrial surroundings and you can be in there for a long time and not get sick of it. It felt like that was quite a turning point in understanding the album in terms of how it was evolving sonically into something that we weren’t particularly worried about, the nakedness of sound. It’s probably the track where the parts are most out in the open on their own, at least for the first half of the song. We were really happy early on with the simplicity of the groove and how the vocals found their way into it. We were feeling good about how it didn’t feel like it needed any complicated or all-encompassing soundworld to take over the scene. Very importantly, it’s our first track where a little ‘E’ for explicit comes up on Apple Music.” “Fieldworks I” OJ: “Anton [Pearson, guitarist] described this as the problem child of the album. The first idea for the track was written in 2021 and I think we finished the final structure for it maybe a week before we went into the studio. It was originally all one track but got separated into two because it has two quite distinct sections. This was the one that set the tone for the record, I think, because it had just been with us for that long.” “Fieldworks II” LN: “We were quite keen early on to try out with [producer] Marta Salogni, seeing what it feels like to do a track or two with a producer we’ve never worked with before. We went up to The Church [Studios] in Crouch End and met Marta and came into this new space and said, ‘We’ve got this track that we know isn’t finished yet and we can’t make a decision on how the second half of it is going to end up but let’s record it anyway.’ The harpsichord that we made for the first half that you hear, that ostinato going through it like a thread, that was originally parts that me and Anton played on guitar that we really liked the harmonic feel of. But something didn’t quite sit with the idea of using guitars to do that. It marks quite a big turning point again to have this moment where we replace something that’s always been so central as a guitar, making it be played by another instrument, letting go of what you assume to be your go-to instrument.” OJ: “Yeah, it sounded a bit too like U2 with the guitars. It sounded too much like The Edge, so we had to take The Edge off.” “Cro - Magnon Man” LN: “Halfway through writing the album, it became really noticeable that we were talking about people more than places and caricatures. I’d come across this book in a charity shop, one of those quite dated 1970s picture books from science, and I was really struck by this outdated idea aesthetically of a figurehead of humankind and modernity that is…well you can’t ascribe the word tacky to it because we’re humans and Cro-Magnon people were the first early modern humans in Europe. It’s this idea of exploring a story of a pathetic self, a kind of hopeless case but for something that we’re also genetically based on, exploring the idea of the cave that the Cro-Magnon man lives in. Caves are always referred to and explored by psychologists as being representative of our mind, what we repress and what we can’t deal with.” “Cowards” LB: “This was the first track we wrote. There was a simplicity to it that felt like it struck quite true [to] what we wanted to achieve from the record.” OJ: “This is one of my favorite tracks on the record because if you dropped into the middle of the track and showed it to a Squid fan, they might not think it’s Squid. That’s always a really exciting prospect for anyone listening to a band that they’re a fan of.” “Showtime!” OJ: “The middle section of this one, where it gets a bit electronic and glitchy, was quite a task because there was just so much going on and it was hard to pin down what that section really was. We threw everything at it. There’s the string quartet, there’s drum machines, there’s synths, Arthur [Leadbetter] sampled some timpanis, which became quite a laborious process for him. It’s about Andy Warhol and how he was maybe quite an exploitative figure in the art world. I listened to a podcast about him. It was quite a trashy podcast, but it was reevaluating how he’s seen in popular culture.” “Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence)” LB: “There’s a hopeful but also somber feeling to the end of this song, which felt representative and nice to be like, ‘What’s next?’ as an end to the album.” OJ: “It’s got [Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter] Clarissa Connelly singing the lead in the first half. It was great to work with her. We hadn’t heard of her before we decided to record with her, it was a recommendation from [Squid’s label] Warp and we thought it was a perfect fit. She’s got a kind of ethereal, incredible range in her voice that goes so deep in the track.”