Squid — Cro-Magnon Man

JUL 01 2025 · 12:00

Squid — Cro-Magnon Man (2025) Director: Rory Alexander Stewart Era: Post-Punk Experimentalism / Art-Rock Vanguard (2025) - Third-wave UK post-punk in its most conceptually ambitious phase; Warp Records-era art-rock intersecting with surrealist visual language and downtown skate culture. High curatorial value as a document of 2025 UK experimental post-punk at its most conceptually and visually ambitious. The convergence of BAFTA-recognised short film direction, Warp Records art-rock, CANADA production infrastructure, and surrealist visual language — all in service of a thematically rich post-human narrative — makes this a significant artefact for archiving both the music video form and the cultural moment it represents. Context: Released February 2025 as the third and final pre-album single from Squid's Warp Records LP Cowards, 'Cro-Magnon Man' arrives at a moment of peak critical validation for the Brighton-formed quintet, widely recognised as among the most experimental voices in contemporary British guitar music. The track conceptually inhabits a dystopian parallel timeline where meaningless objects outlive humanity — a post-anthropocentric anxiety that resonates with 2020s cultural preoccupations around climate collapse, digital saturation, and existential obsolescence. The music video translates this into visceral surrealist imagery: a rollerblader traversing vacant urban infrastructure alongside a bone puppet, collapsing the prehistoric (Cro-Magnon) and the hyper-contemporary into a single uncanny frame. Production company CANADA grounds the video within the global art-music video tradition. Director notes: Directed for production company CANADA, whose credits include music videos for Rosalía, Battles, Beck, and Tame Impala. The video features professional roller skater and dancer Neil Nelly Ingall navigating a dimly lit, concrete cityscape alongside a puppet constructed from bones — a surrealist pairing that visualises the song's themes of decay, meaninglessness, and post-human objects outliving humanity. Stewart described the concept as combining 'the two great art-forms born of the 20th century; cinema and rollerblading.' The visual approach draws on found-footage horror grammar, frenetic montage, and darkly humorous sincerity — qualities consistent with Stewart's short film work.