Recommendations of the editorial team
At the forefront is here and today that I. In view of all the upheavals and apocalyptic developments that are negotiated on cowards, the current album (release: February 7) of Squid, it should be very prominently reported. “I am a good person,” says Ollie Judge, singer drummer and primarily poet by the band, and adds that evil stories are a nice challenge for him. “For a few songs, it is really fun to slip into the shoes of someone who is evil because it differs so much from what I think.” Books and films now act very often about evil people. And now this plate too.
Evil lurks everywhere
Judge described the predecessor O Monolith in the conversation in 2023 as a horror album, and the interviewer notes that Squid 2025 lyrically started hell, evil lurks at all corners and ends. “From Horror to Hell,” says Ollie Judge and has to laugh, “I like that. But musically, it doesn’t apply now.” Of course, the championship of the British quintet is to create large rooms between text and music in which numerous interpretations are possible.
However, the songs on their third album have in common that they look so mercury and are determined by rapid speed and instrument changes, which the listeners: interior shape properly. Cowards has become a light-footed and hot-sporn program program-a counter-design to the Dark-Wave or Rock pain.
The pieces were created within a short time in several places, in the coastal town of Margate in southeastern England and Falmouth in the southwest, not far from Land’s end. For the Recordings, the band finally went to Church Studios in London, where the rock and pop celebrities put their hand in their hands (Adele, Fontaines DC, Pet Shop Boys, U2). The songs had previously run through different stages, says Ollie Judge. “There are longer and completely different versions of all pieces, I have so many files on my laptop, and one differs from the other.” It was already a very experimental approach for squid to finally simplify the music. With the lyrics, things have become more difficult and more confusing.
The moral compass
This is where I come back into play. Ollie Judge had to ask himself a very serious question at one point: “Isn’t something wrong with me?” In the preliminary “Crispy Skin”, the singer processes the reading of the novel “Tender is the Flesh”. Many acquaintances would have recommended the book to him, “as one of the most disturbing reading fabrics. That attracted me, I wanted to see how I react to it.”
In her 2017 Splatterpunk-Novel, the Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica describes a society in which cannibalism has become legal because the meat was affected by farm animals by a virus. “I have to say I wasn’t really shocked by the book,” said Judge, “but” I asked myself, it is also about how difficult it is in such a society to find a moral compass. “
Squid and her record company Warp placed a Takashi ITO video from 1995, it shows a man without a head bound to a chair and is in a kind of laboratory. “It was just perfect,” says Ollie Judge.