O Monolith And The Dystopia Of Squid

Journey through dystopian landscapes, conceptual storytelling, and multifaceted artistry.

It’s the autumn of 2019. It’s the first year of art school, I’m dying my hair all these egregious colours and projecting performance art videos I’ve made onto the side of the University building. I’m watching my friends take ket in tiny ensuite bathrooms and go to private viewings for the free alcohol and maybe an attempt of gaining social capital in this palpable world. Typical art school things, I guess. Music was another major part of my university experience. During my art foundation in the previous year, I sat and made artwork for my portfolio to the entirety of ‘Hail to The Thief’. My friend invites me to her flat share round the corner from the university, where she played ‘Talking Heads 77’ on vinyl. I’d first encounter Squid through a close friend who would indoctrinate me into the world of post punk with the track ‘The Dial’. It’d accompany me for the rest of first year before lockdown, solo smoke sessions at the bench outside halls, walks to Big Sainsbury’s, prees before the night out.

My conception of the song was drawn when I was at the peak of my oh-wow-capitalism-is-shit-and-so-is-the-world mindset, which probably influenced my interpretation of the song as a calling out of oppressive workplaces and likening its life draining toll to vampiric practices. In fact, it’s about a loved one getting a blood test and the nurses turning into vampires. Still, an attraction to this new sound would develop alongside their growing discography.

Squid’s lyrics come across in a haze that aren’t outwardly political, yet influenced by the climate they’re written in. I come back to the year of 2010 (no Squid reference intended), a generation of prospective students to heavy debt and austerity measures. It’s a bleak time to be young and British with a sense of compassion or a working heart. I could really digress, but I’ll put my foot down and leave it there. The Flat Share EP makes light of these issues. Some would dub it post Brexit punk (queue someone shaking their head at the mention of this genre on a BBC Four documentary thirty years from now). Their debut album “Bright Green Field” would come out in 2021, a pandemic baby with a title that leaves a lot of room for speculation. The sounds of this album result in a dark departure from previous tracks that tackled struggles such as the housing crisis and isolation now honed in on over complexly layered ambient structures, references to JG Ballard and Big Pharma, pushing past reality and establishing a space for small dystopias to exist within.

The band’s departure from the post punk sound as well as their counterparts who occupied that same space means that this post Brexit punk can be put to bed perhaps. Expansion is the knife to the genre’s death, Black Country New Road making a switch in their storytelling and singing approaches, black midi swapping out the math rock of ‘Schlagenheim’ for a more prog rock approach, accompanied with a flamenco vibe and shame remaining the closest to this sound but have fine-tuned the brash and abrasiveness of the genre with a more emotional and pensive output in their latter two records.

 The band’s second album released this year, ‘O Monolith’, really piledrives this sentiment home, a fortified forty-two minutes that rivets in between lucid landscapes and animal tyrannies, offering a larger sense of world building than their debut album. The title of the album is synonymous with the idea of grouping and collectivists, some type of hegemony. The band’s insistence on the title being an open thing to interpret means that conclusions to its meaning can expand outside of a dictionary definition and into the conceptual. O Monolith then becomes another name for a country where these tales take place, full of nondescript folklore. An album chockfull of prog rock and time signatures that emphasise the idea of the title of the album contains versions of cacophonies intermingled throughout the album through choir efforts or layered textures. The smog of time means that the narrations don’t have a fixed place, leaving it up to the listener’s interpretation as to where it sits between the past, present and future.

I’m quite privy to making artistic parallels to other mediums when I listen to music and vice versa, so naturally, encountering O Monolith took me to the short story space, where I found that the album didn’t have a distinctive character that carries throughout the album outside of the concept of an uncanny land, but an assembly of characters in different corners of said land (and elsewhere with Siphon Song).

Dare I call it my favourite album of the year with two months to spare? The initial listen took place within my own personal dystopia, the bus route to work, which might’ve been too close to home to encounter the album. Nevertheless, I returned. Going back for one track would somehow end up with following through with listening to the rest of the album, its cohesiveness demands to be listened through.

The first single of the album ‘Swing in A Dream’ is straight up imagery, apt to open the album with a dream inspired song (cites the painting “The Swing” by Jean-Honoré Fragonard ), seeing that we don’t leave this realm of surrealist imagery from this point onward. ‘Devil’s Den’ is a complete switch from the proceeding track, embedded in folklore that reflects the actual location in Wiltshire. The gradual rising to the shrieks where the story changes, descends into chanting territory with guitar screeches that bring you further into this disgruntled tale. If you thought you’d landed on firm grounding, the location is further pushed to outside of earth, where ‘Siphon Song’ has the narrator in the form of an alien, accentuated by vocoder vocals. Inanimate furniture is tackled next with ‘Undergrowth’, defined by its bass riff that helps deliver a funk outlook to life as a bedside table, providing a bleak prospect on the afterlife. The initial premise is amusing in part, the chances of ending up as something such as a cabinet, in the vein of ‘oh, it’s just my luck’ mentality. The darker and sadder nature to the song fruition after the bridge, when the realisations in the lyrics ‘You'll never know I'm even there’, highlight the object’s docility, only interacted with for its need, passive for the rest of its days. ‘The Blades’ comes to a sense of the real world, a perspective on the BLM protests during the initial lockdown, invoking images of a sea of protestors all in one cohesive movement, disposable in the view of the police. One of the highlights of the album is the final two minutes stripped of the amalgamating chaos, just a lone narrator with their fatigued with fighting back against an endless cycle of violence. A return to the haunting comes in ‘After the Flash’, the vocals of Martha Murphy Skye adding to the slog sung by the duo, subjected to putting on a pretence, the title of the album fits this track the most, a monolith of people posing behind smiles, waiting to see how long it will last for. ‘Green Light’ feels like a group of people in a car chase, trying to find the best way out their situation, Bright Green Field fanatics feeling right at home with the track’s semantics, yelps, and fast paced punk delivery. The album’s closer ‘If You Had Seen the Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away’ is a beast of a closing track, flowing perfectly in from the proceeding ‘Green Lights’, with the whispered intro setting the stage for the rat takeover. A whirlwind of irregular time signatures builds towards a complete invasion by the rats, the Shards choir accompanying Judge’s efforts to depict this decimation of the land they’ve taken over in this heavenly chant.

The album artwork designed by Oscar Torrans extends the tale that Squid have woven, the incorporation of ancient and modern monoliths. Torrans best says it himself, that ‘the album's art is then a cover that conceals the underlying sense of fear conveyed within the music with the reverse of the tapestry as the back cover locking it in’.

The creative output from the band shows that they have their fingers to the pulse in terms of the culture, collaborating with the likes of Felix Geen, Kasper Häggstrøm and Raman Djafari to achieve a music video scape that represents the frenzy visions. Touching all components of the visual realm with Claymation, 3D interactive videos, straight up narrative music video. ‘Swing In A Dream’ captures the caustic scope of dreaming whilst depicting the absolute banality of dreams in the same breath, an ambush of people in their repeated movements with the band becoming enlarged characters who tower over the rest in this scope before shrinking to the point of being captured in a cooler box as they run around the hall. ‘The Blades’, turns the process of appointment waiting into a drawling nightmare heightened by the one annoying kid who is to fault for the endurance test that this becomes for Charlotte Richie’s character.

Both singles released in the run up to the album’s release have received UK Music Video Awards nominations. I think it’s common place to put out a video quite haphazardly or hire a talent and be done with the process. Of course, the music is the music so in a sense, it’s not a priority, but the combination of the music with other art forms and the appreciation into the visuals and their meanings, or simply the process, is something worth championing. This is evident with the band, just looking at the description of the video or their tweets as they share a tidbit of the vision, with the utmost gratitude for their collaborators. Past the music videos, you can journey onto the band’s website to find The Undergrowth game, like Mario Bros or when your internet connection is gone so google gives you a dinosaur to make do with. My attempts of gaming prove to be another failure, now scored by a song about death as I watch my character jump into another box of pixelated flames. Meanwhile, ‘The O Monolitheliser’ provides the novelty of creating text in the same font of the album so you can have your own people shaped names.  

The dystopic realm of Squid, or another addition to Squid-lore comes in the enlisting of the literary talent Paul Ewen to write a story about struggling to communicate with people regarding topics like climate change, done so through a stubborn Geography teacher taking a trip with his class. On top of that, Tim Key can be found narrating the story the audiobook version, his humour and personal knack for storytelling well suited to the story enclosed in all vinyl versions of the album.

Now, what I’m about to write about isn’t concerned with the dystopic of Squid but a promotion on my part to urge anyone reading to see them live. This is the type of music that thrives amongst a crowd, with their creativity and skill on full display. A hallmark gig at Troxy was a pure bang bang no filler set. I’d been to a gig the previous night and woke with notably aching muscles as my friend and I stood just behind the barricade. We might’ve moaned and stumbled our way over to the venue, but when the music started, we found ourselves moving and touching the edges of the mosh pit. Never tempting, it seemed like a fun place to be situated within. I opted for pushing past the pain to groove out to the electronic interludes that showcased another side to the band, a display of them further challenging their established sound and opening the possibilities up to what can be for future releases. For this hard work, when the lights come up, I’m relieved for them, the need for an encore not necessary with a show as tightly packed and fluent throughout. 

One could envision the ambient, slower dramatics of O Monolith with a folk feature directed by Mark Jenkins, or an obscure Adam Curtis documentary about pop music and 21st British politics. Oh, let a girl can dream! They evoke the same enthusiasm I have for bands like Radiohead and XTC, all sharing this English sentimentality intermingled with the pastoral and attitude laced with cynicism. For those who opt for a lovely bit of prog rock to sit back and listen to, musical the output of Squid is perfect material from a modern band that will have oldheads frothing at the mouth. And for those fanatical nerds caught up in a ball of cynicism and constant anxiety, their albums won’t distil any of these fears and could affirm them further (sorry), yet even more worth picking apart and engaging with delicate that becomes denser upon more listens and fall into this world.