Album Review Squid - Bright Green Field

‘Bright Green Field’ seems manufactured in the cold, hard grind of a climate-wrecking factory; arrangements are icily wrought like the clanking cogs of industry, hypnotically rotating in perfect tandem for maximum sonic profit. As a sequence of songs, it is masterfully constructed. Tracks skilfully blur into each other, as angular post-punk dystopias (‘G.S.K’, ‘Narrator’) find temporary respite in havens of post-rock ambience (‘Resolution Square’), before being uprooted by the blood-curdling efficiencies of German motorik (‘Peddling’). Shifts from the serene to the breakneck psychotic (with echoes of black midi), are as unsettling as they are absorbing. Lyrically too, Squid fully flesh out their own imagined city-scape of harsh alienation. Singer Ollie Judge could bark almost any absurdism and infuse it with an eerily-relatable Ballardian prescience. Images of global freezing, of bodies being mangled by trees, of insomniac nights soiled by night sweats and the sobs of existential terror, are vocalised with the same rabid intensity as benign observations on British weather and Easter Egg prices. “Open wide, we’ve got everything you like”, he not-too-inaccurately threatens the listener with on majestic closer, ‘Pamphlets’. And they’re not wrong. Squid always seemed destined to have an epic album in them, and they’ve delivered just that.