The Cleaner

Squid make music that seems to be in conversation with itself in real time — the instruments following separate logics that somehow arrive at the same place, tension winding up through repetition until it breaks into something new. "The Cleaner" has that quality of controlled accumulation, a rhythmic foundation that feels almost bureaucratic in its precision before the arrangement opens into something more chaotic and alive. Ollie Judge's drumming serves as the nervous system of the whole thing, and when he sings it's with the wide-eyed urgency of someone narrating events as they unfold rather than retrospectively making sense of them. The guitars have that angular post-punk bite but filtered through art-school restlessness, never quite settling into the expected resolution. Lyrically Squid operate in a world of concrete imagery and oblique narrative — scenes from institutional or domestic life rendered strange through the accumulation of specific detail. They're part of the early 2020s British art-rock resurgence centered loosely around London and Bristol, a moment when guitar music rediscovered jazz and krautrock as liberating rather than intimidating influences. The emotional effect is something like exhilaration mixed with mild vertigo, the sense of a tightly wound spring releasing in stages. You'd reach for this song when you want music that demands enough attention to crowd out other thoughts, that rewards close listening without requiring it, that feels physically energizing and intellectually interesting at the same time.