It wouldn't be hyperbolic to say that Narrator – the lead single from Squid's 2021 debut album Bright Green Field – permanently altered my taste in music. The whirring krautrock, the angular riffs, and the wailing crescendo scratched my brain in just the right way. It captured the hopelessness and helplessness of those pandemic days, perhaps the first time many of us were forced to come to terms with the fact that sometimes things really are out of your control. I was a convert.
When I look back at the albums that have resonated with me, they've all captured a sort of essence, a certain imagery that transcends the music. Avantdale Bowling Club's self-titled debut comes to mind; a collage of the dirty, dead-end small towns that litter much of New Zealand. Swans' The Glowing Man is another, with its sparse landscapes, long empty roads, and ramshackle towns of Tornado Alley. If Squid's debut captured a particular slice of England - old industrial towns; now desolate, black soot still caked to red brick exteriors - then Cowards moves closer to London, modern anxieties broiling against primal fears.
"We return to the scene. We return to the scene. We return to the scene. We return to the scene. We return to the scene. We return to the scene. …"
Judge's vocals have reduced in intensity. The angry mania of Pamphlets or Boy Racers has subsided, replaced with a subdued, calculating intensity that is expertly juxtaposed against Squid's blunt and intense lyrics. Squid has grown up. While not an overtly political band, they've always capture the zeitgeist. The energy and intensity of Bright Green Field was against a backdrop of frenzied hope and anger. The Covid-19 pandemic, for a brief moment, gave us a glimpse into other futures. It was as though we were on the cusp of societal change. Decades of neoliberal capitalist rhetoric fractured at once - the 'infallible' free market required immediate and decisive intervention. Global supply chains turned on a whim. The impossible became, overnight, possible. It was a germ of class consciousness. But it broke people too. A bubbling insanity reared its head, and was captured on the album; whirring machinery, the absurdity of carrying on as normal as the world spinned out of control.
But the blowback was swift and decisive. If anything, the pandemic accelerated capitalism's more oppressive tendencies. While the working class celebrated some new freedoms (working from home? What a luxury!) wealth inequality in the US increased to levels not seen since the gilded age.12 Neo-imperialist tendencies became more pronounced, and growing feelings of precarity have divided the populace, pushing much of the western world towards authoritarian rule. Cowards is a snapshot of this moment. It's darker, nihilistic, freeform. It is music for a world that is more fluid, yet more oppressive than ever.
Footnotes
World Inequality Lab. (2021). The World Inequality Report 2022. //wir2022.wid.world/executive-summary/ ↩
Henry, P. (2022, April 7). Economic inequality has deepened during the pandemic. That doesn't mean it can't be fixed. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/04/economic-inequality-wealth-gap-pandemic/ ↩