Album Review: Squid – O Monolith (Warp Records)

In O Monolith, Squid transcends the avant-garde claustrophobia of their critically acclaimed debut, 2021’s Bright Green Field, with the 2023-released sophomore album offering something more contemplative and unpredictable. Produced by Dan Carey, the album stretches across a broad sound spectrum—ambient passages melt into post-punk outbursts, and intricate rhythmic patterns coexist with atmospheric flourishes. Where the debut delighted in the cacophony of urban sprawl, O Monolith feels like its mysterious namesake. Like with 2001: A Space Odyssey, this monolith is also open to interpretation. On Thursday, October 3, Squid will debut this mystery in Bucharest as part of Control Club’s 16th anniversary.

The Bristol-based band uses the pastoral eeriness of the Wiltshire, UK, landscape as an inspiration, resulting in a more abstract musical territory. From the opening, Swing (In a Dream), the album plunges immediately into this unsettling world. The song’s imagery—singer Ollie Judge trapped in a melting Fragonard painting—creates a dreamlike yet paranoid atmosphere. As synths and brass build toward chaotic crescendos, Squid initiates a tangible narrative tension that runs throughout the record. Judge’s vocal delivery, often restrained compared to their debut’s unbridled energy, gives its calmer moments as much weight as the heavier, guitar-driven segments.

Siphon Song marks the album’s most experimental moment, with vocoder-filtered vocals swirling around layers of breathless synths. The track could easily veer into pretension, but Squid maneuvers the tension, leading it toward a haunting, post-rock-inspired crescendo.

O Monolith balances many themes, from reincarnation to pagan fears. Throughout, there is a sense of loss, an implicit dread of things spiralling out of control—environmental collapse, political dystopia, the erosion of social fabric. And yet, there is no direct polemic; Squid prefer to exist in the ambiguous cracks of meaning.

Devil’s Den proves this with its eerie guitar slides and Judge’s lyrics about witch trials, an evocation of British Folk Horror at home, perfectly at home soundtracking Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England or Mark Jenkin’s Ennis Men. On Undergrowth, Squid’s Kafkaesque narrative reaches a zenith as Judge ponders the absurd notion of reincarnating as a chest of drawers, trying desperately to get his family’s attention. With unmistakable influence from The Mars Volta, the prog-rock track shifts from tight polyrhythms to more free-form sections, never quite landing in one place long enough for things to settle.

Squid layers these with existential tension, such as in Kid A-esque The Blades, a song that begins with an understated menace and builds to an unbearable tension, chronicling the interior life of a police helicopter pilot. Yet this narrative of surveillance and control ultimately slips into a Poe-like exploration of paranoia and ego. The song’s disorienting shifts, from its rhythmic drive to the unexpected tenderness of its final moments, exist in the band’s cracks of meaning. The chaotically beautiful Green Light then returns to Squid’s more mosh-ready energy.O Monolith closes with a fittingly cryptic finale: If You Had Seen the Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Bull’s Away. Whispered vocals, choral chanting, and swelling basslines lend the track a theatrical quality, creating a purposefully unresolved ending.

While the album may lack the immediate explosiveness of Bright Green Field, it is no less impactful. If anything, it is a more daring proposition—a record that seeks to challenge the very idea of what a rock band in 2024 can be. There is no grand statement that ties everything together in a neat bow. Instead, Squid offers a puzzle where meaning is never fixed and constantly shifts in the light. In an era where other post-punk brethren like Fontaines D.C have settled into more defined musical lanes with polished sounds, Squid continues pushing the boundaries of their music.