The British band Squid retains testing its limits—and the boundaries of those that would attempt to outline it. Since 2017, the group has launched a string of latest songs, every a bit weirder than the final, up by way of final month’s “Pamphlets,” one other in a rising constellation of oddities. The band consists of 5 musicians, every of whom has a number of roles: the singer and drummer Ollie Judge, the guitarist and vocalist Louis Borlase, the guitarist and vocalist Anton Pearson, the bassist and brass participant Laurie Nankivell, and the keyboardist, cellist, and percussionist Arthur Leadbetter. The venture originated with Judge, Pearson, and Nankivell enjoying collectively in a soul-and-funk covers band. They additionally shared an appreciation of the German Krautrock band Neu! From these disparate influences, Squid has constructed one thing protean and compelling.

Squid values an egalitarian method. Every thought is taken into account by itself deserves, which can be partly why the songs sound so unorthodox. The band doesn’t have an official lead singer, though it’s most frequently Judge’s shout-singing that erupts from the tracks. When the members write songs, they do it individually, after which match the items collectively. “The way we compose is much more about listening to each other musically,” Nankivell said earlier this 12 months. In 2018, this listening led the band to observe the course of the producer Dan Carey, who had labored on unconventional albums for the London bands Goat Girl and black midi. The song-making of Squid grew ever stranger with Carey in tow. Two singles launched in 2019—“Houseplants” and “The Cleaner” —expanded on the band’s pursuits in funk, digital, and experimental music. “Houseplants,” a rollicking jam with a pop sensibility, deflates into chaotic jazz close to the tip; “The Cleaner” is constantly rearranging itself into self-contained sections. Both songs refuse to settle in a single place. Pearson said that the one theme of Squid is “inconsistency”—rule-breaking, or, relatively, not having any guidelines.

Because of that, there was some confusion over what, precisely, the music is. The band is usually labelled post-punk, a catch-all style for punk rock impressed by almost the rest. Recently, the critic Matthew Perpetua, writing for NPR, grouped them with different “post-Brexit” U.Okay. bands, similar to Dry Cleaning and Sleaford Mods, however wrestled with what to name the burgeoning scene that may embody these divergent artists. The band members perceive this need to categorize, although they discover the makes an attempt unproductive. In 2019, they laughed at being labelled “crank wave,” in NME: “Our music’s not that angry,” Judge instructed the Quietus. More just lately, they’ve come round to the concept of their listeners merely making an attempt to wrap their minds round one thing that’s almost inconceivable to outline. “I remember Punk-Funk was a good one I saw somewhere,” Borlase instructed BN1 magazine. “Everyone needs to make something into an object in order to understand it, so it’s no surprise genre is important to lots of people.”

Squid’s début album, “Bright Green Field,” which was launched final week, can’t be pinned down. Many of the songs break up aside to disclose uninhabited and uncanny worlds inside themselves. On the eight-and-a-half-minute single “Narrator,” the band presents an unreliable male narrator who’s “losing the distinction between memory, dream, and reality.” The vocalist Martha Skye Murphy complicates this interior monologue, enjoying a girl whose reality is overwritten by the male narrator’s unsubstantiated account. Dissolving borders of materiality and lucidity is a recurring bit on the album. These threads are generally pulled so laborious that the music itself begins to unravel into wondrous mayhem. The first correct track, “G.S.K.,” presents a doomsday imaginative and prescient that was triggered by a Megabus trip from Bristol to London on the day that England was purported to withdraw from the E.U.; because the information got here in, Judge was studying J. G. Ballard’s “Concrete Island” and gazing at GSK House, the headquarters of the pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline. The ensuing suspense on the monitor comes from the way in which these signifiers give form to anxious musical grooves.

That underlying anxiousness—the surreality of not having the ability to inform actual life from dystopian fiction—powers the unstable, sprawling orchestrations on “Bright Green Field.” The tangible and the imagined mix collectively, establishing an unidentified but acquainted cityscape. (“It leaves more for the imagination. It could be 2021. It could be the year 3000,” Judge instructed Stereogum.) Throughout the album, the songs evoke stress. There is an depth to the closely rhythmic elements that feels unsustainable—and infrequently any sense of regularity is eroded, till the songs utterly break aside and reform. The second half of the monitor “Boy Racers” swells into the haunting sounds of buzzing drone music produced by a medieval wind instrument interacting with a synthesizer. The dread slowly builds all by way of “Global Groove,” during which an endless information cycle and the entertainment-industrial complicated overload the mind with photographs, to dehumanizing impact. “Watch your favorite war on TV / Just before you go to sleep / And then your favorite sitcom / Watch the tears roll down your cheek,” Judes cries out. Like one of the best episodes of the sci-fi horror collection “Black Mirror,” the album envisions a nightmare world that displays the true potential of our personal to grow to be even worse.

Despite the sombre tone and the sense of unease, “Bright Green Field” is much from joyless. The songs themselves are too catchy and lawless to not convey thrills. Even because the band surveys the unhappy state of the workforce (“Paddling”) and right-wing propaganda (“Pamphlets”), the sensation of being on edge produces a delirious immediacy that provides the music an vitality increase. The album isn’t even all that political. It’s about coming of age amid disaster, and falling prey to the punishing actuality of younger maturity. This isn’t pandemic music, however, within the wake of 1, the convergence of fantasy and constancy—the conceptual and the skilled—is almost inconceivable to disregard. As Squid drifts into a grim world of its personal making, the one exterior attracts a little nearer.