Squid on “Daft Punk era” new album ‘O Monolith’: “It’s quite proggy – for better or worse”

nme.com:

Squid have spoken to NME about recently-announced new album ‘O Monolith‘ – which drummer and lead singer Ollie Judge described as “quite proggy, for better or worse”.‘O Monolith’, scheduled for release June 9 via WARP Records, follows acclaimed 2021 debut album ‘Bright Green Field’ – declared “a dazzling debut of wild experimentation” in a five-star NME review.Earlier this month, the band gave listeners a first taster of the album with lead single ‘Swing (In A Dream)’.“We started writing it the Monday after Green Man 2021” Judge said of the track. “We were really hungover, and I don’t think I could be bothered to play the drums properly, so that’s where that really simple drumbeat came from.”Squid have cited the lyrical inspiration for the single as Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Swing. “I had a dream about this painting – it was all flooded, and everything was floating away” Judge explained. “I thought it might be a climate anxiety dream, so I rode with that and imagined everyone screaming and dying – like that scene in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.”‘Swing (In A Dream)’ was used to close Squid’s recent one-off headline show at London’s SCALA.

The band were originally booked to play the King’s Cross venue in April 2020 after the release of their ‘Town Centre’ EP, before the lockdowns saw those plans scrapped.Almost three years on, Squid used the venue to give fans a first look at tracks from ‘O Monolith’ – alongside select songs from ‘Bright Green Field’.“It felt really nice,” Judge told NME. “I’m always a bit reluctant to just play loads of new material, because I know it’s not what a lot of people want, but that night felt different.