Walking into Junction on a Monday night, one does expect to transcend into the Heavens. Shortly before being plunged into Squid’s hell of thieves, cannibals and the morally corrupt, supporting singer Martha Skye Murphy’s voice floated through the doors towards us. With a dark theatricality, her performance was resonant of the (wuthering) heights of Kate Bush’s tone and Björk’s crazed screams. Using robotically generated recordings of her own voice, Skye Murphy introduced tracks in a reverse (“For now I will play new material”) as hauntingly weird as Twin Peak’s Laura Palmer residing in the shadows of the Black Lodge.

Proclaimed fans of the late great David Lynch, Squid’s ‘Undergrowth’ was inspired by the same 1990s TV show, and I think that their newest album Cowards carries on in the same strange vein. Standing amongst the Radio 6 dads awaiting the band, a banner proclaimed, “We are friends.” Splashed across the back of the stage in huge supermarket letters was a lyric from the later performed single ‘Building 650’. Squid are friends with the fictional ‘Frank,’ a horrible man that the song focuses on who “murders sometimes – but he’s a real nice guy.” Unsettlingly, the narrator of the song cannot cut ties with him. Again, I can’t help recalling the image of the equally evil Bob, lurking in the corners of the Palmer family house.

Opening the set was ‘Crispy Skin.’ Accompanied by frenetic white strobe lights, the song creeps with a distinctly comic book villain energy. A mischievous harpsichord intro launches into lyrics with a far eviller content confronting a cannibal who finds it far too easy to kill his victims. The band exclaimed after playing the song that they all had Nando’s for dinner before the gig, and how bizarre it was singing about human ‘Crispy Skin’ directly after eating. The band didn’t interact with the audience much other than this, but it’s safe to say this set the tone for the rest of the evening. Revealed by the band on Instagram, the song was influenced by Agustina Bazterrica’s ‘Tender is the Flesh’ – a novel I had read a couple of years back when Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Bones and All’ came out, and all I wanted to listen to was Ethel Cain’s ‘Preacher’s Daughter.’

"Cowards is an album that tackles human depravity in all of its disguises and taboos”

Cowards is an album that tackles human depravity in all of its disguises and taboos. Through the subject of evil, Squid approaches greed, apathy, and bloodlust in a magnetic and dreamy presentation where cults, charisma and killers are pursued with a morbid fascination. With foreboding horns, ominous and luxurious layers of sound are gathered by the band, assembling a jittering image of dread. The title track was inspired by Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Dogtooth (for anyone that’s seen this, I too am absolutely horrified by this piece of information). Cowards attacks both the dream and fear of freedom. Beginning quietly and accumulating in intense repeated lines, deceptively glimmering guitars blend tracks into one another.

Since their EP Town Centre was released in 2019, I have been a fan of Squid and their madly incredulous sound. I remember sitting for ages in my room trying to figure out ‘Match Bet’s’ bassline. There were some glimmers of the old within the setlist at Junction, songs from both 2023’s O Monolith and 2021’s Bright Green Field made welcome appearances. ‘G.S.K.’ was punctuated with audience chants of “speeding along, speeding along – and I go through the windshield,” and the wandering ‘Narrator’ (which we moshed to) was played featuring opener Martha Skye Murphy.

“Seeing their live performance at Junction proved that Squid are certainly at their most polished and mesmerising yet”

More seriously, I will never stop being impressed with lead singer Ollie Judge, who is simultaneously the band’s drummer. His familiar prowling, sneering vocals are dragged on top of glitching, zippy guitars and grandiose trumpets. Groovy and entrancing, anyone could recognise the band’s eccentric influence as David Byrne (very much ‘Psycho Killer’ energy), the original post-punk giants Slint, with th krautrock vibe of Neu!.

Even though Cowards as a full album didn’t strike me as anything too progressive or totally interesting for Squid (aside from those brilliant singles, ‘Crispy Skin,’ ‘Cro-Magnon Man,’ and ‘Building 650’), in constructing and killing noise abruptly, there was an intense control to the quieter sections of the new album. Seeing their live performance at Junction proved that Squid are certainly at their most polished and mesmerising yet.

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