Squid’s new single “Crispy Skin” is not only a song, but a grand concept. A grand concept that demands you pay attention – but you see, that’s the problem in today’s perpetual doom scroll. Where a song that’s longer than three minutes gets skipped over into oblivion. It’s a gamble for most bands, but not for a band like Squid, who have demonstrated they are unafraid of pushing boundaries and traversing into new territory.
The song becomes all at once dystopian sounding with a beautiful piano arrangement halfway into the song. The bassline keeps you on the mountainous trip of the track’s rises and falls. seamlessly moving you along the path of the song. Like driving down a pretty road turned to bad weather, the trip becomes treacherous before you realize everything will be ok, you had to simply follow your compass. The introduction of the song clearly indicates this is not a game or a simulation; this is the journey that Squid are inviting you on, into the next phase of a musical expedition. The stops along the way to this point have had just as many unexpected, exciting, artful, experimental turns.
The accompanying video, directed by Takashi Ito, is an adaptation of his award-winning experimental 1995 short film Zone. Ito describes Zone as “A film about a man without a face. His arms and legs bound with ropes, still without even a quiver in a white room. This man, enwrapped in wild delusions, is also a reconstruction of myself. A series of unusual scenes in this room that expresses what lies inside me. I tried to create a connection between memories, nightmares and violent images.”
To top it off, “Crispy Skin” is equally as abstract in lyrical content, with inspiration drawing from a dystopian novel called Tender Is The Flesh. Judge of the band explains how the book brings about moral questions in the disturbing situation of a cannibalistic society. Do you take the moral high-ground or do you fit in and follow suit? The track embraces how unexpectedly difficult it can be to have a moral-compass in these stories of desperation and horror, how it is much more likely that one would become the coward than the one to cause an uprise.
Squid called on several additional distinguished friends and musicians for added voice and instruments on the track. Danish experimental songsmith Clarissa Connelly, composer, pianist and singer Tony Njoku, Rosa Brook from punk group Pozi, percussion wizard Zands Duggan, and Jonny Greenwood collaborators the Ruisi Quartet for violin, viola and cello. The range of sound allowed Squid to further push out and realize their vision for the song.
Whatever comes next I’m in, no matter the funhouse of mirrors Squid have set up all over their new album Cowards, which drops February 7th. Pre-order here.
Cowards Tracklist
1. Crispy Skin
2. Building 650
3. Blood on the Boulders
4. Fieldworks I
5. Fieldworks II
6. Cro-Magnon Man
7. Cowards
8. Showtime!
9. Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence)
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