May 2021 proved to be a very eventful month for music, with many of the year’s most highly anticipated projects being released, including Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour and Twenty One Pilots’ Scaled and Icy. While much of the music released this month was extremely impressive, such as the lush atmospheric black metal of Panopticon’s …and Again Into the Light and black midi’s chaotic avant-prog on Cavalcade, it was ultimately the manic art-punk of Squid’s Bright Green Field that I enjoyed most.
Squid, a band hailing from the quickly growing London post-punk scene, had released a handful of promising singles and two EP’s since 2017, so Bright Green Field, their debut album, was a highly anticipated release. Luckily, the group delivered on the project’s hype with an anxious masterpiece.
The instrumentation of the album is impeccable, as the complex guitar lines mingle with the sparsely used horns and synths. The tight and rhythmic drumming keeps the groove constantly locked in, even as the rest of the instruments occasionally grow chaotic and noisy. The first track, “G.S.K.”, is an instrumental highlight of the album, with the horns creating an effectively dystopian vision of a “concrete island”. During an instrumental break in the song, the guitars quickly shift from an apocalyptic waterfall of chords to a sound that is almost comparable to smooth jazz. A later highlight is on the track “Documentary Filmmaker”, as the subdued horn-driven instrumental slowly morphs into a passionate and desperate call for change. The track gradually picks up momentum, as the vocalist and drummer, Ollie Judge, nearly screams mundane observations, like “It was warm in the summer…but snowy in February” and “The eggs are always cheaper, the day after Easter”. The thematic harmony between the lyrics and instrumentation paints a picture of a narrator who seeks refuge from the maddening tedium of his day-to-day life.
While the lyrics certainly take a backseat to the atmosphere and instrumentation of the record, they are often very impressive and affecting. The most impressive tracks are undoubtedly the two longest; “Narrator” and “Pamphlets” both exceed eight minutes but are constantly engaging and impressive – a great feat, considering their run time. On “Narrator”, Judge tells the story of a character who has created their own fictional world to maintain a sense of order in their life. The track starts out slow, as the titular narrator sings, “I’m trying real hard, I think I’ve made it up”, but quickly gains energy as the narrator grows more desperate; the last 4 minutes are possibly the most intense on the album as the instrumentation grows increasingly suspenseful and the narrator repeatedly sings “I’ll play mine, I’ll play mine, I’ll play mine”, starting with nearly a whisper until he is screaming over the erratic guitars and precise but passionate drumming. “Pamphlets”, the last track, is actually one of the more lyrically minimalist tracks on the album, but what is there is incredibly moving; for the first time on the album, almost all the instrumentation drops away and there’s a moment of calm as Judge solemnly sings a simple, yet cryptic, line: “That’s why I don’t go outside”. As this is the first line of the song, the listener is left wondering what “that” is referring to; as, the last song on the album, I interpret it as referring to everything discussed in the songs that came before it – urban dystopias, concrete islands, the pervasive nature of marketing, and exploitative multinational corporations. The narrator who so passionately mocked these concepts throughout the rest of the album is left almost defeated at the end, only able to retreat to his own head once again.
Squid’s Bright Green Field is an apocalyptic masterpiece for our era of environmental destruction and instant gratification. Its lyrics are immediately impactful and the instrumentation is always engaging and progressive. The album, for me, cements Squid as already among today’s most exciting and forward-thinking rock groups like Glass Beach, Daughters, and Black Country, New Road.
The Verdict: For its complex instrumentation, cryptic lyrics, and dystopian atmosphere, Squid’s Bright Green Field is May 2021’s Album of the Month.
