The abyss stares back at Squid on Cowards

Discovering a severed ear that would lead him to psychopathic gangster Frank Booth and a whole world of trouble. This exploration of the darker side of human life became a Lynch signature, most starkly realised in Twin Peaks and it’s cinematic prequel – where pure evil could be found in almost every corner of the titular town if you looked hard enough.

Squid’s third album Cowards is fascinated with this idea that evil lives among us, just as humans have been for centuries. It’s an idea that stretches back to our hunter-gatherer days, a need to understand evil to protect ourselves, but has since become entertainment – from public executions to monetised misery in the form of true crime shows and podcasts.

However, instead of observing at a distance, Cowards does as Jeffrey Beaumont does and wades right into the darkness. Watching its characters try, though sometimes fail, to confront what they might find there. If 2021's Bright Green Field and 2023's O Monolith were more outward looking, exploring the often scorched marks humans are making on society, Cowards is much more introspective.

Opener “Crispy Skin” uses the emergence of a cannibalistic dystopia to show how easy it can be to let your moral compass be swayed by desperation. “One hit right between the eyes / It’s become so easy, that’s no surprise”, drummer and frontman Ollie Judge sings, before quietly asking “Am I the bad one?” Unlike Judge’s usual yelps, there’s an almost placid acceptance here; of evil taking over.

This existential crisis of navigating the thin line between good and evil defines much of Cowards. On the darkly comic “Building 650”, Judge wrestles with being in such close proximity to evil but being too cowardly to call it out. Introducing us to Frank: “He’s my friend / There’s murder sometimes / But he’s a real nice guy”. The act of sitting on the fence is given world-ending grandeur on closer “Well Met (Fingers Through The Fences)” – a poetic call to action to not just watch the world burn. Meanwhile, on “Showtime!”, the band embody Andy Warhol to explore the self-serving evil of exploitation and egomania, declaring “You could be my angel star / You could be my footnote”.

With all this wickedness, you’d be forgiven for thinking Squid might have gone back to the propulsive anger of Bright Green Fields. But, if anything, Cowards is their most sonically accessible record. Calling on the production expertise of Marta Salogni and Grace Banks, who most recently worked on English Teacher’s Mercury Prize-winning This Could Be Texas, Squid's anger becomes quieter.

That’s not to say it’s without those moments of tightly-coiled tension that explode into a flurry of krautrock chaos.“Blood On The Boulders”, a critique of the dark tourism around the Manson murders, explodes into a grotesquely voracious desire to “return to the scene”. But its power stems from an oddly innocent-sounding first half that makes the track’s second feel even more disturbing.

Those quieter moments lend a more menacing tone than any furious cacophony ever could. Only the opulent “Cowards” and closer “Well Met (Fingers Through The Fences” track brings any form of light, with beautiful brass trying to break through the blackest of clouds. But even “Well Met” has a sad, sinister edge, with horns that sound the end and a demonic whisper reminiscent of Kate Bush’s “Waking The Witch”. Like a horror film, Cowards is a lesson in restraint. It builds dread with slight but sudden stabs, scrapes, and bubbling bass, and rarely gives you the pleasure of a cathartic release. It’s a long way from the funky chaos of “Houseplants”, and it’s all the more interesting for it.