Squid: Town Centre - Rodeo

Squid: Town Centre
British outfit Squid caught our attention at this year’s SXSW with their nervy, dynamic art punk, and their debut EP Town Centre, which was released a few months later, cemented the hype. “Savage” sets the scene with swirling ambiance, the faint ringing of church bells, and sultry saxophone—it sounds like a slow pan of a desolate Medieval town at the peak of the Black Death. The anxious post-punk of “Match Bet” sees lead vocalist Ollie Judge write from the perspective of a manic gambler, while “The Cleaner” is a bombastic ‘80s synth-punk (think Talking Heads meets Brainiac) ode to a janitor who dances “with DVDs and books” to “rocket pop.”

 Throughout this seven-minute, wonky scene, “The Cleaner” celebrates people who work thankless, faceless low-wage jobs, and somehow its protagonist takes pleasure in the small details that make their job bearable, like their “favorite shoes” and the music that blares as they sweep and mop. It’s a seering rebuke of modern labor (“I’m the cleaner who gets home whose body drops down / On the floor as you find it there with a brush and mop”) and a depiction of how transcendence has become an essential late-capitalist coping mechanism. The EP closes with the minimal drum machines of “Rodeo,” a critique of the competitive sport which abuses large animals for often violent and often six-second-long chaos—all for mere human entertainment. The characters and narratives in Town Centre are all ones that aliens would find mind-boggling, but Squid capture this surreal world with charming humor and stark, poetic flare. —Lizzie Manno