Paddling

A frantic sprawl of interlocking rhythms opens this track — drums that feel like a bureaucrat having a nervous breakdown at their desk, all snare stutters and hi-hat micro-bursts firing across a lurching bass groove. Squid layer trebly, angular guitar lines that dart in and out of the mix like interruptions in a meeting no one wanted to attend. The tempo doesn't so much build as it accumulates pressure, piling tension until the whole thing threatens to collapse under its own restless energy. Ollie Judge's vocals arrive strained and insistent, delivered with the barely-contained desperation of someone who has been trying to say something important for a very long time and keeps being talked over. The song orbits feelings of futile effort — the sensation of exerting yourself against systems that simply absorb your motion without registering it. Underneath the anxiety is something almost funny, a darkly comedic awareness of one's own absurdity. This is music for the fluorescent-lit afternoon, for the commute that stretches past the point of endurance, for the moment you realize you've been filling out the same form in slightly different ways for years. Listeners drawn to the anxious, tightly wound post-punk of late-2010s and early-2020s British art rock — Wire, Talking Heads, Gang of Four filtered through an art-school sensibility — will find it immediately legible, though no less unsettling for that.