Cowards is the ideal album that a band in Squid’s position would put out: one that builds on the ideas that defined in their first two albums, but doesn’t stay comfortable in what they know best.
When you’re young and feel trapped in the shrink-wrapped, small-minded town that you grew up in, getting out seems like the most alluring plan of action as soon as you have the means. While fantasizing about the outside, the very real and inevitable flaws of your bucket-list destinations don’t pop out at you the way they would to a native; you’re unable to detect the evil that can lie beneath wherever you try to escape to. For Squid, after spending the early half of their still-mounting career raising Krautrock-infused post-punk hell in retaliation to their hometown of Brighton’s issues and vices, their third album Cowards sees the quartet reflecting on their world tour revelations now that they’ve had the chance to broaden their view. They tackle the horror of looking inward—both infrastructurally and interpersonally—realizing that some original sins are inexorable, no matter how hard you try to outrun them.
Cowards is cunningly meticulous in coming to this revelation, while still seething with the pulsating, folded anger that defined Squid’s earlier albums, 2023’s O Monolith and 2021’s Bright Green Field. It plays with tension and worldbuilding; burning questions regarding morality, depersonalization and the flaws of global culture outside of Britain are slowly exhumed through vocalist Ollie Judge’s impressively restrained volume control as the album creeps forward. He still has his moments of trademark squawks, but the impossible answers to the inquiries that fall out of his mouth as hopeless drawls are more effective in their uncomfortability. “Am I the bad one?” he asks with an almost-naivety on the album’s leading single “Crispy Skin,” before declaring, “Yes, I am.” He admits it again later on “Fieldworks II:” “I’m evil too.” Following Judge’s tendency to find musical inspiration in the pages of sci-fi novels, the song was penned through his reaction to Agustina Bazterrica’s dystopian cannibal novel, Tender is the Flesh. It’s a fitting origin story for the core thesis of Cowards—a project that stems from the sobering fear of realizing the horrors you pride yourself on critiquing are more ingrained in humanity than you’d previously thought.
We follow the band as they venture through places they’ve visited—New York, California, Tokyo, Eastern Europe—and build honest, boots-on-the-ground narratives centering characters they’ve encountered and stories they’ve noticed. Songs like “Blood on the Boulders” play out as scathing gonzo journal entries, as Judge refuses to fall victim to the intoxicating charm of the American Dream, calling out its flimsy drywall homes and lack of regard for wildlife when carrying out excessive disposal methods. As the tinny guitar picks up and Judge’s breath becomes heavier, the song explodes into nauseating calamity; overlapping, mumbling voices chant “We return to the scene” and frenzied violins try to scream their strings off to no avail. The chaos abruptly halts and the song closes out with Judge reciting lines in a hushed whisper again, a sort of somber acceptance that makes Cowards sound less angry on the surface level, but casts it into something deep-rooted and pensive. You can only scream and thrash so much until your voice gets sore, and Cowards is Squid coming to terms with the fact that anger becomes dormant resentment as the world plunges further into unsolvable chaos.
The narratives on Cowards are a lot more literary and calculated than the subjects of their previous work, focused on named characters whose own stories unravel parallel to the band’s own experiences. Frank, Judge’s dark yet charming anti-American friend that guides the lens on “Building 650,” hides a horrid secret out in the open. Judge looks past it due to his niceness, but hints that even though “murderers saying lovely things” might seem hard to come by, he’s seen rarer things. Then there’s the titular “Cro-Magnon Man,” whose several cubed sides and ubiquitous identity as both predator and prey are not enough to cast a meaningful impact on an already crumbling society. These characters live as the unkempt flaws that lay out in the open, adding perspectives to a world that was, at times, tightly-framed in earlier albums. Squid has expanded their palette of societal setups and destructions that exist outside of their hometown, while still accepting their place in the midst of it all.
Sonically, Cowards might be Squid’s most actualized and in-depth venture yet. Their early-2020s post-punk roots are still tethered to their process, through darting guitar escalations and spoken-word utterances and the 60s-psych-Kraut beginning of “Building 650,” but Squid have never been a band to follow the limiting constraints of their press-assigned labels to a T. “Fieldworks I” and “Fieldworks II” is a progressive tale that unravels within its strong, melodious string and horn section, aching with drawn-out emotion and extended strain. A lot of instrumental buildups through the album don’t always lead to the eventual discharge of loudness as the song comes to an end, but rather manifest in other parts of the work down the line. “Showtime!” starts out with foolproof jutting guitars and a looming bassline backdrop, but is underscored with tinkering electronic sludge and fuzzy synth pats. A wavy guitar solo unravels into the best breakdown on the album, playing out like an endless car chase into the dystopian desert.
The experimental soundwork adds to the album’s already developed storyline and characters, like the clear-cut chain links heard at the beginning of “Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence),” the construction grumbling similarly to the drills that reverb at the beginning of NEU!’s “Negativland.” The album ends closely to how it started—with the faint, synthy glimmers of “Crispy Skin” ringing through once again—perpetuating the endless societal feedback loop the band has uncovered, realizing there’s nothing they can do to fix it. “The future’s perfect from the backseat,” Judge laments on the album’s last line. The awareness is there, now all you can do now is drive forward.
Cowards is the ideal album for a band in Squid’s position to put out: one that builds on the ideas that defined in their first two albums, but doesn’t stay comfortable in what they know best. It’s expansive, fascinating and reckless, while ever-aware of its human limitations and anxieties. The addition of the quartets, percussionists and extra voices create a lush camaraderie that makes the record feel united in its revels of shared evils and imperfections. Despite its name, Cowards is not an album about surrendering completely—it’s the next step that comes before moving forward, the overwhelming sensations that materialize the moment you become aware of how bad this world can truly get. “Us dogs and rats will never escape,” Judge admits on the title track, “If you said it could be better out I probably won’t believe you.” It’s a relatable sentiment that we all can relate to at this current global timestamp—wherever you are in the world—but if this one petrifying realization unites us, we can advance to change. We just have to get there first, and as Judge peers through these castle walls and garage doors that keep the good out, he remains open: “We’ll see.”
Alli Dempsey is a freelance music and culture writer based in Staten Island, NYC. She interned for Paste’s music section in the fall of 2024 and is a graduate of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism.
