Squid
Bright Green Field

To talk about the Squid, a band from Brighton that released their debut album this year, I have decided to introduce the review with a brief chronological summary of the three different post-punk waves that have cyclically impacted the world of rock music, starting from the late '70s.

Post-Punk is perhaps the only music genre that, first spanning the '70s and '80s, and then across the turn of the millennium, has managed to show a longevity that transcends simple revival, revealing itself as a true attempt to bring new glory to mainstream rock music in its most experimental, melodic, and contemporary form. The first wave featured some of the most radical bands of their era. Among them, I would cite Wire, PIL, and This Heat as examples of groups that managed years and years ahead to anticipate the future directions of rock music, influencing hundreds of bands that still today, in 2021, look up to these bands with endless reverence. Interpol and The Strokes, protagonists of the second post-punk wave, by reprising the sounds of the late '70s classics, managed to clearly define the rock direction of the new millennium and impose themselves in the pop culture of the time with high-profile artistic results. Then, for the genre, a void. Starting from the '10s, hip-hop immediately became the mainstream genre of reference internationally, reaching maturity and visibility thanks to albums like Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, a true instant classic, and Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition. And a small parenthesis on Atrocity Exhibition would be appropriate. The album presents us with an extremely adventurous approach to musical sampling, and it shares this approach with the intellectualistic and unsettling desire that distinguished the bands of the first post-punk wave. It's no coincidence that the album's very title openly cites the masterpiece track that opens Joy Division's Closer. But let's go back to rock. Around the mid-'10s, some post-punk bands made their mark on the music scene that would, by the end of the decade, achieve miraculous critical acclaim: Idles, Parquet Courts, and Protomartyr. And again, in Britain, a small group of bands made their mark on the international scene as standard-bearers of the new rock: the Black Midi with their debut album Of Schlagenheim; the Black Country New Road with For the First Time; and Squid with Bright Green Field. All three bands often find themselves playing at the Windmill in Brixton, a live music venue in London, and are frequently identified by music critics as post-punk bands when they actually tend toward an eclecticism that makes it difficult to pigeonhole them into a specific music genre. Black Midi have a keen interest in Slint, King Crimson, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra; BCNR, besides Slint, blend their sound with Godspeed's Post-Rock and Klezmer; then Squid, more rooted in the Post-Punk genre, look with great admiration at Byrne's neurosis and the experimental Krautrock of Can. This overview helps us understand how and why the international critics have come to define Bright Green Field as the most electrifying and interesting debut album of this 2021, a standard-bearer of this new post-punk wave coming from Britain.

The Squid, after causing much buzz around their name with the release of the single Houseplants and the excellent EP Town Centre, signed with Warp Records and released one of the most anticipated albums of the year, Bright Green Field. A human figure traversed by a landscape of skyscrapers lies on a sunlit lawn. This is what the cover shows us. And consistently with the openly metaphorical visual aspect, the album is marked by lyrics that offer us an anti-capitalist reading centered around the role of man in the post-globalized world. The album is characterized by wild musical versatility, shifting from Talking Heads to Can and from Radiohead to Swans in just a few seconds. This curious musical alchemy is best represented by what is perhaps the album's cornerstone and synthesis of Squid's musical identity, Narrator: one of the year's most beautiful "rock" tracks. The peculiarity, and perhaps the most challenging element of Squid's heterogeneous sound, is the voice of Ollie Judge, drummer and vocalist of the band. His singing recalls both Byrne and James Murphy, but much more over the top and decidedly neurotic. Yet, this distinctive voice that at first impact might seem unpleasant, after a few listens reveals itself as complementary to the multifaceted proposal and inseparable from the instrumental part. Boy Racers, which initially presents itself as the weakest track on the entire album, suddenly surprises the listener in its second half, venturing into fairly unusual but perfectly executed drone and ambient territories. The album ends with Phamplets, a long track that evolves into a cathartic instrumental coda, leaving us to conclude this journey, immersed in the green of the cover, extremely exhilarated.

Bright Green Field is a child of contemporaneity, and it is an attempt—if not to decipher it—to offer us tools to interpret and try to understand it. We have reached a stage where this complexity in which we are forced to immerse ourselves day and night begins to reflect itself in the musical offerings of generations of young people raised in this elusive and incomprehensible world, presenting us with a fusion of genres and influences that only two decades ago were unimaginable. We have reached the end of that process, and we are beginning to face a stratified musical offering, like a potpourri of algorithms suggesting what to listen to based on our preferences. It is a fascinating vision for the evolution of music, which now seemingly transcends its reference genres to present us with a heterogeneous assortment of musical continents without borders.

In conclusion, Squid's musical offering does not shine for originality, but the extreme musical consistency, compositional prowess, and great skill of the performers make the album one of the best releases of the year and one of the most interesting post-(punk?) albums of recent years. It will be curious to follow the evolution of this band, as well as that of other groups that over the past couple of years have been trying to offer us a less stale musical perspective that can represent the era we find ourselves living in as much as possible.