While still rounding up Squid’s modern anxieties into electrifying songs, O Monolith is a more refined experience, deep in thought yet buzzing in a freshly post-isolation world. 

Circular synth arpeggios and pendulum-swinging guitar licks open with laser focus on ‘Swing (In A Dream)’, subtle yet frantic as a driving beat kicks in and Ollie Judge sings “I worry in my sleep” to right-angled riffs tossing and turning. Themes of displacement and friction run throughout the record, with domesticity and the environment rubbing against each other, and our relationships with violence and being witness to endless streams of it. 

Guitar plucks on ‘Devil’s Den’ stalk suspiciously against a baroque backdrop of brass and horns, lilting until theatrical thrashes drop in. ‘Siphon Song’ lurches into a smooth jazz-adjacent vocoder ballad, with spellbinding vocal tapestries intensifying and collapsing under gravitational weight. ‘Undergrowth’ enters a post-punk-funk groove, tense with guitars scribbling viscerally down the frets, exploring reincarnation and animism in the mundane set to music that is anything but. Heavy footsteps lumber on ‘After The Flash’, Judge muses “How hard can it be to live a normal life?” before crashing into the track’s unending ascension. 

The world hasn’t gotten any less turbulent since Bright Green Field was released in 2021. Squid’s debut was a definitive outcry in a hyperpolitical era: punk in all senses with its witty defiance of the present shouted over upfront, rocking thrill ride, yielding fierce experimentalism powered by varied instrumental palettes and non-sequitur structures. It didn’t take long for the band to start formulating their follow-up; just two weeks after their debut’s release, their second album O Monolith began to manifest and swerve even further leftfield. 

Ever restless, Squid have knocked it out of the park once again on O Monolith, grounded in post-punk but taking off into something entirely new.