Squid - Crispy Skin

JUL 01 2024 · 12:00

Squid - Crispy Skin (2024) Director: Takashi Ito Era: Post-Punk Art Rock Revival / Mid-2020s Experimental Vanguard (2024) - UK art-rock at peak conceptual ambition; single released November 12, 2024 ahead of the album Cowards (Warp Records, February 7, 2025) Exceptionally high. This video represents a documented, sourced collaboration between a living canonical figure of Japanese experimental cinema (Takashi Ito) and one of the UK's most critically significant art-rock acts. The adaptation of Zone (1995), an Oberhausen prize-winning short, as a music video establishes a verifiable archival lineage, making this entry uniquely valuable for both music video history and experimental film studies. The quantitative metrics (rapid 1.51s avg shot, warm 2.25 colour temp, low 88.28 brightness) are directly interpretable as aesthetic signatures of the source material's 16mm photographic origins, providing unusually rich ground for metric-to-aesthetic correlation research. Context: Released November 12, 2024 as the lead single from Squid's third album Cowards (Warp Records, February 7, 2025), Crispy Skin marks Squid's most conceptually ambitious visual statement to date. The video's source material, Takashi Ito's Zone (1995), bridges Japanese avant-garde film history with contemporary British art rock, creating a rare intercultural archival crossover. Lyrically, the track was inspired by Agustina Bazterrica's dystopian novel Tender Is the Flesh, in which institutionalised cannibalism becomes societal norm, with vocalist Ollie Judge interrogating moral cowardice within systems of normalised horror. The visual language of bound, faceless figures and fragmented imagery amplifies the song's themes of vulnerability, dehumanisation, and identity dissolution. The pairing of Ito's 1990s Japanese experimental cinema with a 2024 UK post-punk single represents a significant moment of cross-generational and cross-cultural avant-garde dialogue on Warp Records. Director notes: The Crispy Skin music video is an adaptation of Ito's award-winning 1995 experimental short film Zone (13 min, 16mm, colour). Zone depicts a faceless, bound plaster figure in a white room surrounded by objects and imagery drawn from Ito's broader filmographic universe, described by Ito as connecting memories, nightmares and violent images. Zone won the Main Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1996. The adaptation recontextualises this archival experimental film material as a visual complement to Squid's dystopian lyrical themes. The video's rapid scene change rate (253 cuts in 382s, avg 1.51s/shot) is consistent with Ito's characteristic frame-by-frame stop-motion and rapid photographic sequencing techniques. The warm colour temperature (2.25) and low brightness (88.28/255) reflect the original 16mm film's incandescent-lit, analogue visual character.