Squid Cowards LP

Squid's 2025 album Cowards is about evil. Nine stories whose protagonists reckon with cults, charisma and apathy. Real and imagined characters wading into the dark ocean between right and wrong.

Cowards is Squid's most courageous album: simultaneously growing in scope and returning to basics. The band recorded Cowards at Church Studios in Crouch End with Mercury prize winning producers 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.

Squid have come a long way since forming in 2016 as an instrumental jazz band for a monthly night in Brighton. Their debut album Bright Green Field (2021) arrived as the world was starting to open up after the pandemic and they broke into the top 5 in the UK chart. In 2023 they released their sophomore album, the brooding O Monolith, which took the band all over the world and broke new ground that hardly seemed possible years prior.

Where before their music coiled, now it unspools. The seething tension of young Squid has given way to a searching, frayed soundtrack for the long generational experience of the center refusing to hold. On Cowards, Squid's world and sound alike open up. It feels as if their story is just getting started.

...Squid are, as ever, a uniquely propulsive unit who seem to recycle their own energy and maintain that patent elasticity throughout. The arrangements here are surprisingly ornate, bordering on chamber pop.