“Well, I’ve always been told what to do,” the narrator of “Peel St.” mumbles, “but now, I’m free/ There’s no warden following me.” Whether the prison from which this character has been released is literal or one of the mind is left for the listener to decide, and most of the details underpinning Bright Green Field’s paranoid, dystopian universe are similarly vague.
Though Bright Green Field is easily Squid’s most musically varied and ambitious work yet, the British quintet—whose contemporaries include black midi and Black Country, New Road—remains thematically tethered to the pervasive anxiety and fear that have defined them from their 2019 breakout single “Houseplants” through last year’s Sludge / Broadcaster 10”, their debut for storied electronic and experimental label Warp.
“2010” is similarly nauseous in both its calmest and most violent moments: As its narrator loses himself amidst the sickening pull of corporate life, the music suddenly transforms from crisp, dissonant arpeggios into a frenzy of Schlagenheim-like overdriven guitar blasts.
Seven-and-a-half-minute adventure “Boy Racers” begins as an insomniac nightmare of dueling post-punk guitars that dance around each other like two figure skaters off their Xanax, but halfway in, it decomposes into a drone passage as disgusting as it is gorgeous.
I could swear the first time I listened to the slow-as-molasses breakdown of “Global Groove,” I heard at least three different voices trying to break free from an old tape recorder, but on subsequent listens, it just sounds like two different voices interwoven from separate recordings.
The tranquility does make one thing unmissable: “Oh, I know, “Judge laments as the loudness fades, “He’s filming all the time.” Is “he” the warden from “Peel St.”? The details of Bright Green Field’s Big Brother are never quite clear, and that’s fitting for an album that positions the whole world as the enemy.