Bright Green Field

At last the debut album from Squid and it’s everything you wished for and more. Bright Green Field is produced by Dan Carey and released via Warp Records. It’s an album of towering scope and ambition, it is deeply considered, paced and intricately constructed. With all band members playing such a vital and equal role, this album is very much the product of five heads operating as one. Some bands might be tempted to include previous singles on their debut – and the band already released two more in 2020 via ‘Sludge’ and ‘Broadcaster’ – but instead Bright Green Field is completely new. This sense of limitlessness and perpetual forward motion is one of the the key ingredients that makes Squid so loved by fans and critics alike, from BBC Radio 6 Music who have A-Listed previous singles, Houseplants, The Cleaner and Match Bet to publications such as, The Guardian, NME, The Face, The Quietus and countless others.

Bright Green Field features field recordings of ringing church bells, tooting bees, microphones swinging from the ceiling orbiting a room of guitar amps, a distorted choir of 30 voices as well as a horn and string ensemble featuring the likes of, Emma-Jean Thackray and Lewis Evans from Black Country, New Road. Whilst the album title conjures up imagery of pastoral England, in reality, it’s something of a decoy that captures the band’s fondness for paradox and juxtaposition. Within the geography of Bright Green Field lies monolithic concrete buildings and dystopian visions plucked from imagined cities. Squid’s music – be it agitated and discordant or groove-locked and flowing – has often been a reflection of the tumultuous world we live in and this continues that to some extent.