Squid – Narrator ft. Martha Skye Murphy

It’s a marathon, not a sprint, Bristol five-piece Squid proves on their behemoth new single ‘Narrator’.

Seriously long running times are the current trend of the UK’s rising wave of new rock bands it seems, as ‘Narrator’ rises to the occasion with eight and a half minutes of pure brilliance. Inspired by 2019 movie A Long Day’s Journey into Night, ‘Narrator’ tells the story of a man slipping in and out of what he perceives as reality, with his dreams and the real world eventually blurring together. As his own desires begin to shape his reality, the man eventually becomes his own narrator, with Martha Skye Murphy, playing the female character seeking to escape the male’s narrative.

While the story of ‘Narrator’ may appear to be a lot to process, the instrumentation is thankfully just as complex, spectacularly so in the most fantastic of fashions. Divulging from hits of math rock to the punk screams of vocalist and drummer Ollie Judge, before descending into a malignant pit of disco and synth, only then to be shot out into a build-up of industrial rock, you’d think that ‘Narrator’ would be reaching its end before you look and see you’re but halfway through.

Now lost in what you could swear to be a lost scene from The Blair Witch Project (if you’re watching the video), the looping cries of “I play mine”, grow more malevolent and cynical with each passing second, before the screaming match between Judge and Martha Skye Murphy breaks out to draw ‘Narrator’ to a terrifying close.

So if these eight minutes sounded as enticing to you as they did to me, you’ll be buzzing to know that“Bright Green Field”,  Squid’s debut LP, is coming out via legendary label Warp Records on the 7^th of May.