Out 7th February 2025 via Warp Records, the third album album from Squid, Cowards, is about evil. Nine stories whose protagonists reckon with cults, charisma, and apathy, with real and imagined characters wading into the dark ocean between right and wrong. Pre-order the album HERE.
Crispy Skin, the first track from the album, features a tense and paranoid-sounding Ollie Judge tearing through a richly imagined dystopian world. The sharpest lyricism is partly inspired by the book Tender Is The Flesh, where cannibalism becomes the norm.
”Crispy Skin was lyrically inspired by a dystopian novel I read where cannibalism becomes the societal norm and humans are manufactured and sold in supermarkets,” Judge adds. ”I think when most people read books like these they picture themselves as the sort of person that would take the moral high ground within these narratives. The track was written about how the reality of having a moral compass in these stories of desperation and horror would be extremely difficult.” Stream HERE.
The official music video adapts director Takashi Ito’s award-winning experimental short film Zone (1995). ”A film about a man without a face. His arms and legs bound with ropes, still without even a quiver in a white room,” Ito adds. ”This man, enwrapped in wild delusions, is also a reconstruction of myself. A series of unusual scenes in this room that expresses what lies inside me. I tried to create a connection between memories, nightmares and violent images.”
On Cowards, the English art rock quintet extend and explore textures of folk, kosmische, psychedelia, jazz and electronics – hovering at 30,000 feet above distinct tales of human evil: apophenia-tinged songs punched by vantablack comedy. The band recorded Cowards at Church Studios in Crouch End with Mercury prize-winning producer Marta Salogni and Grace Banks. On additional production is longtime shifu and collaborator Dan Carey, who recorded the band’s first two albums. The record was mixed in Seattle by John McEntire, before being compressed by the rich analogue chain of Heba Kadry’s mastering in Brooklyn, New York.
For additional voice and instruments, Squid called on distinguished friends and musicians: Danish experimental songsmith Clarissa Connelly, composer, pianist and singer Tony Njoku, Rosa Brook from punk group Pozi, percussion wizard Zands Duggan, and Jonny Greenwood collaborators the Ruisi Quartet for violin, viola and cello. The range of sound allowed Squid to push out further, writing arrangements that build into crescendos before dropping into discrete melody. Fleeting voices in eerie rounds evoke prehistoric song and nursery rhyme.
Check out the video for Cowards below:
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Squid are offering fans who pre-order Cowards by midnight on Sunday 17th November first access to UK tour presale from midday Monday 18th November. Tickets go on general sale from 10am on Wednesday 20th November.
Tour UK dates below:
17.02 – Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool, UK
18.02 – O2 Ritz Manchester, Manchester, UK
19.02 – Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, UK
21.02 – NSU Domain, Newcastle, UK
22.02 – Leadmill, Sheffield, UK
24.02 – Junction 1, Cambridge, UK
25.03 – The Adrian Flux Waterfront, Norwich, UK
27.02 – O2 Academy Oxford, Oxford, UK
28.02 – Engine Rooms, Southampton, UK
01.03 – Lido, Margate, UK
02.03 – Chalk, Brighton, UK
04.03 – XOYO, Birmingham, UK
05.03 – Bristol Beacon, Bristol, UK
26.04 – Roundhouse, London, UK
Cowards Tracklist:
1.Crispy Skin
2.Building 650
3.Blood on the Boulders
4.Fieldworks I
5.Fieldworks II
6.Cro-Magnon Man
7.Cowards
8.Showtime!
9. Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence)
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