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Squid - Simple Things Festival 19th October 2019, Bristol

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Anton Pearson - Driving Through Belgium

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Squid Thrill Brooklyn Steel with Newest Album

Squid – Brooklyn Steel – February 10, 2024

I could be off the mark here, but in recent years, there seems to be a much bigger appetite for weird stuff in music. The pop stars are weaving in longer, riskier samples. Harpists are playing sold-out live shows. The drum-and-bass DJs are making ambient albums. Experimentation is back, baby, and thankfully that meant a busy night for the exceptional Squid, the five-piece post-punk outfit from South London, who played Brooklyn Steel on Saturday night.  

They are touring behind their second album, last year’s O Monolith, another boundary-pusher that follows their first LP, Bright Green Field, from 2021. Notably, both releases came out on Warp, a label that leans mostly electronic and has put out records by artists like Aphex Twin, Kelala and Mount Kimbie, among other innovators. The marriage may seem to be a strange one, but any close listener will get it, especially live.

Take “The Blades,” which begins with a spare, quick-cutting loop. Guitar layers in, but so do the stranger bleeping, synth-y moments expected of Warp. At first listen it emulates the übercatharsis of “Pamphlets” (Bright Green Field) — a quiet bridge, a strong closing build — but it fine-tunes, mellows and sophisticates it into something even grander. That the two were back-to-back closers — a kicker that quite frankly worked beautifully — was a perfect distillation of the band’s evolution.  

They played new (“Undergrowth”) and old (“Narrator”), but the show calibrated the two well, working in genres that ranged from psychedelic to metal. Navigating that ship through such changing waters is Ollie Judge, lead singer and drummer. He makes you wonder why drummers haven’t always been the default leads. His vocals go quiet, large, then pained, then ecstatic. He stands, drums and saunters, the energetic and emotive core of Squid’s ethos. 

The band’s latest has them extending past simply playing and into composition, and to witness them move further into their own was fantastic. A deeply unique band with a seemingly endless well of invention. Squid forever. —Rachel Brody | @RachelCBrody

Photos courtesy of Edwina Hay | thisisnotaphotograph.com

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Anton Pearson / Nike / Nike Running / The Flatiron Posters / We Run NYC / Poster / 2014

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