Interview Class of 2020: Squid

Despite starting out playing at jazz clubs, the five-piece’s love of pop has also become a key ingredient in their music. Teamed with a penchant for the avant-garde, it makes Squid’s output unusual but entirely unforced. They’re not trying too hard to push their experimental influences to the front for muso brownie points, or stressing the hooky element to get radio play. They’re just a band who have a remarkably firm idea of who they are. “It's just there within who we are as writers,” Arthur continues. “I think if we all wrote individually, we'd write a mixture of different things and we are all influenced by pop. We are all influenced by ambient, by jazz, by all different things. It's only natural that it comes out that way.”

Despite clearly not making a beeline for the radio, Squid have nonetheless found themselves as mainstays on BBC 6 Music this year, with ‘Houseplants’ and ‘Match Bet’ never far from the station’s A-List. Being a band loathe to make concessions in their music, even this small adaption inevitably ruffled a few feathers.

“Making the radio edit for ‘The Cleaner’ caused the biggest argument we’ve had as a band,” bassist Laurie Nankivell remembers. “Someone came up to us after a show once and said ‘I loved that extended version of ‘The Cleaner’ that you played’,” Louis adds. “No! That just IS ‘The Cleaner’!” Evidently, radio edits aren’t Squid’s bag; to understand the fast-rising five-piece, you need to see the whole picture. Lucky, then, that their debut album is on its way.

The initial seeds of what will become their first full-length came from fiddling about with new ideas at soundchecks, relishing the “three to five minutes” they’d have on stage before the sound engineer was ready for them to try out new ideas. However, the meat of the writing is set to follow shortly at a forthcoming retreat to that well-known hideout of creativity: the cabin.

“It’s called The Hedgehog Cabin,” Arthur tells us. “It’s got a jacuzzi!” “Only acoustic instruments on this album, then,” Louis jokes, with a grin.

Though their frenetic live shows and genre-fusing music have become their calling card, Squid’s lyrics remain one of the most compelling parts of the band’s make-up. While ‘Houseplants’ sees the band dip into social commentary, Ollie’s words largely weave surreal, dark tales that give the mundanity of the everyday an extra spice. ‘The Dial’ concerns a nurse in a hospital who turns into a bloodsucking vampire, while ‘Match Bet’ is told from the perspective of a mentally ill Sonic Youth superfan who frequented a shop that Ollie used to work in, with his “manic conversations” about gambling, the ‘90s rock legends and more melting into a song that’s just as fidgety. ‘The Cleaner’, meanwhile, “imagines the divided work and play structure and thinks about breaking from it,” according to Ollie. They’re strange and surreal paths that he wanders down across the ‘Town Centre’ EP and beyond, and ones that are intriguing to follow.

Many of the stories that have made it into Squid songs so far are borne from the repetition of day jobs. Yet now, with the dream of becoming a full-time band newly a reality for the five-piece, some of the fundamentals of their existence are changing. Where, we ask, is Ollie’s new inspiration set to come from? “I’ve got really into sci-fi recently,” he responds, before revealing that his other current obsession is, uh, escape rooms.

“It's naive to think that your world is only as big as what you've experienced day-to-day though,” Arthur theorises, riffing on the theme. “That's why we all escape when we finish touring, because our world is bigger than touring. Touring can be a bubble, but I don't think it's good to live your whole life inside that bubble.”

“I've been walking around at awkward times on days off in between tours,” Louis begins of his endeavours to extract parts of a more ‘normal’ life when he isn’t on tour. “Those days when you want to see your friends but they're all at work and you find yourself doing really weird shit, like walking to the shop to get something that you don't really need that you think is going to make you feel better... like fish oil...

“I write these things down in my notes and read through them when I'm back in the van again. I think there's something quite inspirational about the time you have [alone] when you spend so much time in a group and with the same people, or with faceless people like various stage managers every single day. When you suddenly find yourself on your own, it's quite an inspirational feeling.”

Despite their energetic, gang-like mentality on stage, Squid aren’t your average hell-raising lads with guitars. In fact, they’re far more at home when, well, at home, diving deep into pretension without apology. “My ideal day is turning my phone off, having a smoke and just sitting in a room alone, creating,” Arthur states. This approach makes itself known in interviews too - while Squid’s on-stage presence paints them as yappy dogs with limitless energy, sit them down and they talk about their music seriously, with precision, intellect and level-headedness.

This two-pronged attack is what Squid are becoming masters of though; they’re a shape-shifting band that appeal as much to the muso chin-stroker who shares their love of Arthur Russell as the moshpitting indie kid, and the two are married without limits or boundaries.

“A lot of our live show takes on a different shape night by night,” Arthur says. “If you’re playing in a venue with great acoustics and you can hear what [your bandmates] are doing, you play better. And if you can’t then you tend to play a different character of set, like a really fun punky set in a basement. It can completely change depending on where we are.”

It’s a clashing of styles that makes their live show a consistently refreshing prospect, even after an omnipresent summer. One that makes ‘Town Centre’ an EP with the scope and vision of a much larger piece, and their debut album one of the most exciting musical prospects of 2020. And it makes Squid a band to treasure.

Tags: Squid, Class of 2020, Class of…, Features, Interviews