In 2019, only a few years after meeting in high school, the abrasive British rock band Black Midi became proof that—despite political turmoil in the U.K.—the kids were actually doing pretty well. Their technical prowess and boundless energy won them early fans in London’s indie scene, and their acclaimed debut Schlagenheim eventually launched them on a world tour where they impressed people of all ages who love knotty, anxious guitar music. After getting a nomination for the Mercury Prize, the country’s award for best album, in September 2019 they made the type of prime-time TV debut that becomes the stuff of lore, full of dissonant chords, flying sweat, acrobatics, and a few winsome squeals from the band’s transfixing lead singer, Geordie Greep.
A few months later, the band—which, alongside 21-year-old Greep, also includes bassist Cameron Picton, also 21, and drummer Morgan Simpson, 22—was already beginning to work on a follow-up album when the world shut down. The tight-knit group quarantined separately, and in a recent interview, Picton noted that it was the longest they had been apart since they were 16. Still, they kept writing music remotely and headed to the Wicklow Mountains, south of Dublin, over last summer to record their second album, Cavalcade, which is out this week. On it, they hold onto their reputation for aggression and complexity, while adding melody and a whole new emotional dimension.
According to the members of the group, who spoke to Vanity Fair on a Zoom call from their London practice space earlier this month, the biggest change is that they actually composed the songs this time around. “On the first album, most of the songs were more textural than, you know, traditional or whatever. They were more, someone plays a riff and then let’s all play on top of each other and make cool sounds,” Greep said. For Cavalcade, they wrote partly through jam sessions but also by individually bringing in ideas for songs in the more traditional sense. “The whole thing with this album was just making it a lot more melodic but also making the crazy bits a lot more crazy. Making it crazy in both directions—more accessible moments, and more tangible, but also more insane, more crazy, more funny.”
Cavalcade, cover art designed by David Rudnick
Greep, an overcoat aficionado prone to speaking in aphorism, said that one frustration of the attention that followed their first record was that, despite the yelps and strange noises, people didn’t always pick up on the jokes. “The big thing was meant to be the humor of it but a lot of people didn’t really get it or thought it was too serious,” he said. “So with this one, it was a bit more obvious, like, this is definitely meant to be a joke or meant to be silly.” They all agreed they also wanted to write music that got them out of what Greep described as “rage mode.”
On Cavalcade, the humor and insanity is both lyrical and experiential. The record begins with “John L,” a practically scary onslaught of crunching horns, guttural vocals, and clattering percussion, which fades directly into “Marlene Dietrich,” a hazy crooner that could fit in on a.m. radio. Those stylistic veers of flight and surprises persist throughout. “It’s more of a roller coaster,” said Picton.
Bassist Picton, sporting a mop-top of curls and red-painted fingernails, said he did read a handful of reviews for Schlagenheim and thought they didn’t do a great job of capturing the breadth of the band’s listening habits. They don’t only listen to noise rock, for example, and aren’t particularly obsessed with the genre’s history. “I think it’s just funny when people say, like, ‘Oh, yeah, these guys are definitely influenced by X band,’” he said. “But then it’s just a band that we’ve never heard of. It’s some random American band that was a regional success, and we’ve never heard of it in our entire lives, and the only people that like it are nerds on weird corners of the internet.” (So what do they listen to? “A banger is a banger,” Picton quipped.)
It might seem a little strange that a couple of talented teenagers could tap into exactly what keeps rock nerds hunting through the archives without necessarily realizing it, but their explanation is two-fold. The band met at the BRIT School, the government-funded music school known primarily for producing pop stars like Adele and Jessie J and for the profound influence its well-trained musicians have had on the British record industry at large.
Simpson said they were a part of a larger group of kids at the school who had more outré interests. “Our year, specifically, was just very diverse with so many different types of players into so many different types of music,” he said. “I think it would have been a completely different story had we all been in the year before or after us, like I don’t even know if the band would have been a thing.” Greep noted that the band emerged after playing with other students in the school’s practice spaces at lunchtime or on rainy days, and that the lineup of Black Midi didn’t become official until they had booked their first gig in 2017, at the Windmill, a small Brixton club that has become a launching pad for a new generation of British rock musicians.
Unlike the video-game-inspired genre of impossible music where they found their name, they don’t make music sonically inspired by the internet, but they do have a very modern approach to genre-mixing and mining for inspiration. Simpson, in a zip-up fleece and a beanie perched on his dreads, credited the kaleidoscopic melange of culture they’ve experienced living in London for their listening habits. “Being a young person living in London in the past couple of years, there are all the influences that we can sort of take from,” he said. “You can go to a gig at the Windmill, and you go to a night out and hear loads of dub, or go out to another gig and hear loads of funk or jazz. There’s so much around us, it is impossible to not be influenced by those things.”
He brought this up while discussing the newer wave of bands emerging from this same cultural mix that have found success despite the pandemic. Picton was enthusiastic about the fact that Squid and Black Country, New Road, two bands produced by Black Midi’s early champion Dan Carey, saw their debut records land in the Top 5 of the British charts this year.
“I think that’s something the pandemic helped,” Picton speculated. “The labels basically stopped signing new acts, and there were no gigs or anything like that, so there wasn’t really anyone playing around to sign anyway. So a bunch more resources got put into those bands and also the people—the consumers or whatever—that would have been going to shows ended up buying records.”
In some ways, it doesn’t quite make sense to group Black Midi in with the rest of them because they are slightly stranger and wholly their own. (When I tell the band I think they’re doing something completely new, Simpson objects. “I don’t think anything is ever new,” he said. “It’s just a different amalgamation of influences.”) But at the same time, it’s impossible to look at them, the infrastructure that contributed to their chops, and the path they’ve blazed for others and not be oddly optimistic about the future of rock music.
As for Black Midi, the band is looking forward to getting back to what it does best, performing live. When we talk, they’ve just finished rehearsing for two shows on Friday night, their first in-person performances since early 2020. Like most stunning natural phenomena, Black Midi does kind of have to be seen to be believed. Offstage, they’re a group of unassuming, agreeable friends in their early 20s with an easy rapport, but onstage, they’re a chugging machine that always seems on the verge of collapse. Greep is the wiry, barking archetype of a post-punk front man, Picton has unshowy mastery of his instrument and a metronomic sense of rhythm, and Simpson is, simply put, one of the most physical, electric drummers around.
They discussed the challenges for touring bands presented by Brexit and the aftermath of the pandemic, but Greep is pretty confident that there will always be an audience for what they have to offer. “This isn’t chart music or anything,” he said. “But I think there’s always going to be that niche of live music, music that’s played with instruments and everything that sounds like it can fall apart at any minute. Because people just like that.”
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