The Post-Brexit New Wave
When the British band Squid released the single "Narrator" in January, everything about it felt like a dare. The song's sprawling length — 8:29 — is posted on the cover art, scrambling expectations and heralding greater ambitions from a group best known at that point for a frenzied punk tune, "Houseplants." "Narrator" traps that same energy within a tight Krautrock-ish groove, and when that wears out, the song coasts onwards with two spoken-word parts that illustrate feeling caught in the gravity of a self-absorbed person, the kind who lives as though they're the main character and everyone else is just a walk-on. It's a weird but effective set of contrasts — wild but controlled, artsy but focused on basic physical response, berserk emotion colliding with detached erudition. In other words, it's a song designed to make you ask, "What is this?"
Music genre names can be silly, annoying and reductive, but you something happening in the United Kingdom and Ireland, a cohort of very good bands who meet this vague, wordy description — Squid, Dry Cleaning, Shame, Courting, Sleaford Mods, Yard Act, The Cool Greenhouse, Home Counties, Billy Nomates, Legss, Fontaines D.C., Working Men's Club and Black Country, New Road among them. When these artists began popping up around 2018, what they shared read as coincidence, if anything. Today, the wave of like-minded new bands from this part of the world is approaching something like critical mass, and its leading lights have begun releasing some of the most exciting debut albums and EPs so far this year. Whatever is happening, it's hard to ignore.
