Let Em' Talk: Mitch from Two-Man Giant Squid guides us through their new self titled album
If desperate times call for desperate measures, then we're not far away from last resort territory. No, not that Papa Roach song from 2000 and something that was all over the Kerrang! channel that you used to play in private because it was a banger...not that. I'm thinking trying to win hearts and minds rather than stopping my own heart and mind.
The idiots may have taken over the asylum (I refuse to type their idiotic names), but there are already signs that even those who supported them are losing patience. They're not going away for a while sure, but they can be forced into change and then forced out. Tell the stories, correlate facts and figures, keep calling out their bullshit and GET BETTER.
Until then, the best we have is the art and music to help us bring some humanity back to world running out of compassion and empathy. There are no tariffs on great music.
Yet.
Casting those external pressures aside is something of an M.O for Two-Man Giant Squid. Creating an album of such creativity and wit must be a difficult task in 2025 America*, where the temptation must be so intense to run for the hills with only an Iron Maiden album and a fuckload of LSD for company. Thankfully, the Brooklyn band decided against that and wrote an album that I'll be playing several times a day for at least 29 years.
Mitch Vinokur is the lead singer and songwriter of the band, and started TMGS as a solo project before expanding to bring his live vision to life. Two Man Giant Squid is their third album - read our review of second release Intro To Basement HERE - and takes the quality of the compositions to a new level. We got Mitch to take us through the new album track-by-track and he gave us these insights.
*Yes, I'm fully aware this weird little island on the other side of the Atlantic is not much better.
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1) No Expectations
I
started working on this the day our last record came out. I think I was using
it as an outlet for the anxiety of working on something for so long and having
it out in the world. That record killed me a bit because I never thought that
what started as a bedroom project would one day have expectations and deadlines
hanging from it. This song is a ‘fuck you’ to letting outside expectations get
the better of us, and a rallying cry to live your life to your beat and not
someone else’s. The random-ish stuff I say throughout is just stream of consciousness
from the very first demo, it’s a rallying cry that we're getting back to having
fun with making music and shedding our external pressures. I kept those in to
feel like the song is making itself as its going along and to invite you into
my songwriting world. Musically, I tried to make the song constantly build
tension. There’s a few different payoffs along the way but the biggest is saved
for the end when it feels like our band has reached the full scope of that tension.
I like the tone it sets for the album, its repetitive but before you know it
its grown into an intense driving force that tries to get you to say ‘’Woah, I
better buckle up for this band, they’re kicking in to high gear’’
I had been working on a song called “Brian Eno” for over 6 months. One day at rehearsal, I decided to scrap it, giving in to my perfectionist nature about how I couldn’t get it to the place I wanted. After rehearsal our band had a big fight on the subway platform about it. My fiancĂ© (our synth player Sam) was really upset that I let that process take up so much of my life with nothing to show for it. This song was written the very next day. It broadcasts that fight that we had on the subway platform, and it encourages people to not be afraid to show off their ‘weird shit’. To let their freak flag fly. It also explores how trying to be perfect can instead lead to self-destruction. It’s done in a signature tongue-in-cheek TMGS way- With me arguing with myself for most of the song.
This
is our take on Spiritualized’s 1997 psych classic from their acclaimed album, Ladies
and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space. I heard this song on a bus ride
home one day and by the end of it I was crying. We decided to do a version of
it to open our band’s live sets. Our version cuts out some parts of the original
song and creates an arrangement more suited to a psychedelic payoff halfway
through with those words “I think I’m in love” echoing out like crazy. For a
while it was just a live opener and was not intended to be recorded, but over
time I realized that the lyrics work perfectly within the context of this
record that we were working on. Everything is call and response and the
narrator is struggling to make sense of what he’s experiencing. “I think I’m in love – You’re probably just hungry”. This was recorded in one take in a live
studio in Philadelphia.
A 6
minute chanty dance-punk odyssey.. this is really a 2-part song. The first part
touches on obsession. For me, “Snareworld“ is when I’m obsessively tweaking the
most insignificant tones of say, a snare, and letting those little details run
my life. For you, it can be anything that you let drive you crazy. If you live
this way, “You’ll never make it out alive.” The 2nd part is a
rebuttal to that, bringing forward the argument that you are who you are and
its human nature to let the details distract us from the greater horrors
of life. Musically, it weaves in and out using an arpeggiator that by the end
of the song feels like it’s a part of you, building and falling multiple times
on its way to reaching its peak.
5) Room
Full of Ghosts
I
view this as the emotional center of the album. This song underwent many
different versions and is the best example of Teddy’s production influence. He
pushed our boundaries and helped it stand out as a moment of indie solace among
an otherwise chaotic album. I wanted this type of breather to kick of Side B of
the vinyl. It’s about mine and Sam’s relationship and about being scared that I
would somehow fuck it up. There's a time early in that process of figuring out
if you want to be with someone forever where you have to think about what it
would be like if the relationship ended, if you didn’t have her. It’s a painful
but necessary lens to explore, because how you feel about it can show you how
strong the love really is. I like the conflict-ridden nature of that thought
and wanted to center a song around it. It also features my favorite guitar solo
Robbie has ever written.
6) Give & Take
Right after ‘Ghosts’ we want to bring you back into our post-punk dance party. This song creates a character - a suited up, snake oil salesman get-rich-quick kind of guy who is looking to take advantage of people. I think the world has become filled with these types of people and they justify their taking advantage of by saying ‘well it’s all give and take right? That’s life’. The choruses jump back to “well I just wanna dance’’ as kind of a juxtaposition to the darkness of the outside world that’s taking advantage of us. This is a song that was untitled on our early live sets that we were finally able to record the way that we wanted to. Robbie wrote an amazing guitar part to round out that big ending. It’s a ‘let’s dance while the world is burning’ type song, which are often my favorite types in rock music.
7) I was a DJ in 2015
Remember when everyone you knew suddenly became a DJ a decade ago? Guilty as charged. This song explores that time in my life and comments on what it’s like to chase a trend in your early 20s. It’s also a bit of a love letter to those times. Its saying- “Wow what the hell was I doing? Was I just trying to fit in?.. I don’t know but I kind of miss it for some reason!” It comments on what its like to age out of a scene as well, and how to be okay with looking back on questionable times in your life. Its okay to miss a part of yourself while also being a little embarrassed of it. So this is our lonely-indie-dancefloor love letter to the scenes we leave behind as we grow older.
Find out more and engage with Two-Man Giant Squid on Instagram and as usual, we recommend you buy music or merch directly from their Bandcamp
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Bare in mind, vibes don't pay the bills.
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