The past few years have seen a boom in experimental rock acts coming out of the UK. The Brixton windmill has become a hub for bands producing a tense and complex brand of rock that draws equally from the past and the future, yet even amongst this crowd, Squid stands above the rest thanks to their anxious rhythms, eclectic influences, and raw musical talent. Music editors Devin Birse and Oliver Scoggins chatted with the band’s guitarist Anton Pearson to discuss their critically acclaimed new album O Monolith, the experience of recording in Peter Gabriel’s famed Real World studios and the shifts in the band’s approach to songwriting.

Devin

Your first album Bright Green Field is a very manic album with yelped vocals and angular guitar, whereas this one has a more melodic side; was that a conscious switch?

Anton

We don’t make that many conscious decisions at all to be honest. We just kinda get in a room together and write instruments and music – that’s how everything starts. So, I guess part of it was just getting better. We worked on how to introduce more complex harmony and melody into the music. The way I think about it Bright Green Field had a lot of layers but less complexity. So, we learnt how to use fewer things to create more on the next album.

The way I think about it Bright Green Field had a lot of layers but less complexity

Oliver

I was going to ask – do you consider live shows when you record the album? I remember you mentioned workshopping the album on tour after Bright Green Field came out.

Anton

When we’re writing music sometimes you hit something and it’s quite difficult not to think ‘I’m really excited about playing this live because it’s gonna feel really good in a live context’ and sometimes you kinda think the opposite: I’m excited to get this in the studio cause that’ll get the best out of it. So yeah, we’re thinking about these things but we’re never chatting about them. We talk about musical elements and crafting things in a way that we think will be the most exciting.

Devin

I know for this album you recorded with Dan Carey again, though this time in Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios in Wiltshire rather than Dan’s smaller London-based studio. Did this change in the studio bring a change in the creative process? I noticed that while Bright Green Field is a densely urban album, O Monolith is often quite rural.

Anton

Yeah definitely, they were different environments. Dan’s studio is about the same size as lots of people’s living rooms, and Real World studios is massive. Dan’s got quite low ceilings and is in a densely populated area, so the space is a lot more congested. If you listen to a lot of Dan’s stuff that he’s recorded, you know, you end up with these really tight sounding records and they’re really tense. You kind of feel like you’re ready to explode whilst listening to them in a really exciting way. But then the thing with Real World is it’s really big but because it’s a much more expensive studio it’s more adaptable in lots of ways so you can be more expansive. But it’s not the sort of place where you can’t create those tighter moments as well. It’s a totally different environment I suppose; there’s those big windows, it’s quite airy, you have that rural view of the pond – it’s all quite posh. That definitely influenced how things sounded from a production point of view; it meant certain elements just had more space to breathe in a really physical sense.

The thing with Real World is it’s really big but because it’s a much more expensive studio it’s more adaptable in lots of ways so you can be more expansive

Devin

The few city-focused songs on the album seem oriented around Bristol so I was wondering if the city was a conscious influence on the album overall? With ‘The Blades’ being based on the kill-the-bill protests that happened there, and in previous interviews, you’ve credited Bingo Fury’s drummer Henry Terret as an influence on the percussion on the album.

Anton

Well more than influence – he’s on the album.

Devin

Oh really? That’s awesome.

Anton

Yeah, he played percussion. So Zands who I don’t know if you’ve seen us live but in quite a few live shows he plays percussion with us. He did all the percussion for this, but we also needed someone else to help with that, so Henry ended up doing that for this album.

On the last one, we did all the live takes as a five-piece band and then put elements on top and did most of the percussion ourselves. This time we wanted the percussion to be a big part of it, so we did the live takes all together with the percussionists. So, we went from playing as a five to playing as a seven. It meant that nobody could screw up. It was seven things that could go wrong rather than five, which is quite fun. But yeah, they were both great. I’m really pleased with how things came about with that.

But answering your question about Bristol, we’ve got a lot of ties to Bristol and before writing this album we had a studio space there. So a lot of the elements started there and if they weren’t directly in Bristol lots of them started in the west country more generally. But I think apart from that apart from ‘The Blades’ the focus was less on cityscapes this time around as the kind of imaginative environment. Most of the writing we did was just on the other side of the river to Real World Studio, so there was quite a nice organicism to how close we were to physical spaces from where we started writing things to where we finished recording them.

Oliver

Just on the percussion side of things, you mentioned in a KEXP that you used the sound of Dan’s front gate for his house as the clanging sound at the start of ‘G.S.K’. Just wondering if there are any more kinds of out-there sounds that you put onto the album in that vein?

Anton

Yes, definitely, Zand was the lead percussionist and he’s got all kinds of different things he’s made out of like junk or whatever that are all over the album. He’s got this instrument called a hadfoon, which is a kind of metal disc with like spirally metal bits going up. It’s a kind of tuned metal going out to the side, and you can hear that in ‘The Blades’. There’s quite a lot of that in there, in the last part of ‘Devil’s Den’ as well, you can hear that out-of-tune clang of metallic sounds. We also did a little bit of field recording around the space we were working in as well: the recordings of birds were taken literally about 50 meters from the inside of the studio. But there’s nothing as funny or weird as using a gate. There’s a bit where everything kind of like closes sonically in ‘Undergrowth’ and we used a camera shutter sound to help create that. But I’m not sure if it ended up staying in there – when you lay things up and process things you can’t always remember what was in and what got sent to the bin.

When you lay things up and process things you can’t always remember what was in and what got sent to the bin

Devin

I touched on this a little bit earlier: whereas Bright Green Field was often an album of big climactic moments, on O Monolith that’s replaced by longer drawn-out ambient and drone sections that create a real sense of dread and doom. Going into this album were you guys planning on this shift or did it occur naturally?

Anton

The basic thing with us is we’re just doing whatever we find exciting in the moment, and I think we’ve done lots of one thing so it’s exciting to do something else. I think we’re excited to have more elements where instruments were allowed to breathe, and we could kind of take our time with sections and music without being worried about cramming things in five seconds and letting things last 30 seconds than they need to. This album’s a lot shorter in the end just because we’ve gotten better at choosing which moments need time to breathe and which ones don’t. I think in the last one there was a lot of extending things and cramming all the elements in we can, and I think that’s quite natural for a first album, because you’re just excited to get everything in that you can. But I think once we got that pressure off where we’re able to kind of explore just like taking our time and enjoy hearing two or three instruments at a time rather than 25.

This album’s a lot shorter in the end just because we’ve gotten better at choosing which moments need time to breathe and which ones don’t

Oliver

You said with the album title you were quite happy to leave it up to interpretation, and you maybe hadn’t figured out or didn’t want to put a meaning to it. I just wonder if you’re still quite happy with it just being open to interpretation or has it gained more meaning now the album’s come out and people have reacted to it?

Anton

It’s been nice hearing what people have taken from it. It didn’t come from nowhere, you know, it’s connected to the folk story elements in the album and us feeling like the album was a daunting task. Something that we needed to put everything into to properly achieve. There are a lot of places that we referenced throughout the album that are monolithic in their own way but to go into it being like ‘it’s called O Monolith and it’s because of this thing’, that felt kind of boring and it gets annoying just saying the same thing. With Squid, we’re never sure exactly what everything means, so there’s no point in just making up a story that puts everything into a box that everybody can like, understand, and repackage. I think people find that element of music exciting, that they can put their own spin on it. It doesn’t have to be totally explainable; I suppose.

With Squid, we’re never sure exactly what everything means, so there’s no point in just making up a story that puts everything into a box that everybody can like, understand, and repackage

Oliver

We’re a Birmingham-based publication, so I was wondering if you had much experience playing in Birmingham as a band.

Anton

We’ve played it very few times and always had good shows. We played in The Crossing in Digbeth. It’s funny most of the times we’ve come to Birmingham we’ve played in that area, which is fine, but I feel like I haven’t really got to know Birmingham as well as some other cities because we’ve always gone back to that same area. One time we went to a Japanese restaurant around the corner, and it was our first time working with a new sound engineer called Ben who we still work with now, we all kind of ordered some food and he just went ‘I think I’ll have an Oreo milkshake’ and we were like what the hell. It just like came from nowhere so uh, that’s one of my best memories from Birmingham – having a really nice meal and Ben tucking into his Oreo milkshake in a Japanese restaurant.

That’s one of my best memories from Birmingham – having a really nice meal and Ben tucking into his Oreo milkshake in a Japanese restaurant

Devin

One last quick question as we’ve got a bit of time; I was wondering if there were any smaller artists you’d like to recommend.

Anton

There’s a cool band called Divide and Dissolve. I’ve been listening to them recently. They’re a kind of like drone metal band. There’s a band called Water from Your Eyes, I really like their music and their last album was wicked. Clarissa Colney we’ve got to know recently and she’s amazing. There’s three off the top of my head.

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