On a shaded jetty by the Thames, within cannon-fire range of the Tower of London, Black Midi are sizing up an inflatable yellow motor boat named Exhilaration. Behind the wheel of the 12-seater vessel looms a seafaring hippy in aviator shades and a black bandana, with the sort of speckled stubble that suggests an unresolved personal crisis. Other than that vaguely pirate presence, the planned boat ride appears to promise a splendid afternoon on the water.
Above the thrashing river, a rubbery noise gasps from someone’s life jacket. The stern woman leading the outing whips around and takes stock. Before her are frontman Geordie Greep, a riff wizard who sings like a haywire auctioneer; Morgan Simpson, who would have revolutionized alternative rock by now, if other drummers could keep up with him; and bassist Cameron Picton, who occasionally takes the mic for songs that pivot between fingerpicked folk and post-hardcore—and whose shoulder flaps are inflated to his cheeks.
“Was that supposed to happen?” Picton asks innocently.
The guide teeters between sympathy and annoyance. “There is a fine for pulling the toggle.”
Picton mutters a meek protest.
“It’s £75,” she says, settling on a sad scowl. Greep and Simpson restrain grins, as their bandmate unhappily thrusts his head into a replacement jacket.
All aboard, Exhilaration swings around the dock and gurgles eastward, toward the jostling shoulders of the finance district. As the driver lashes the souped-up dinghy into hyperdrive, Simpson cries out—first in shock and then, enlivened, with joy. Picton, his £75 sulk vanquished, whoops uproariously, a liberated wind ruffling his hair. Nobody was expecting music, but now the James Bond theme is roaring at festival volume, and Black Midi are fist-pumping the air. Greep, blond hair blasted back into a ridiculous 1980s quiff, battles considerable G-force to twist around to me and yell: “So what do you think of the new album?”
Hellfire, Black Midi’s third LP, is a delightfully unruly escapade. The prog-scale ambition and rascal sensibility are still there, the rabbit-hole riffs and tangly compositions still yanked along by Simpson’s breakneck beats. But it expands upon 2019’s Schlagenheim and last year’s Cavalcade in every direction, beyond their sugary thumpers and noir balladry into a circus of sonic and literary excess. Now all 23, the members of Black Midi are lightyears from Britain’s typically debauched guitar grifters; in what may be a first for their label Rough Trade, the boys in the band of the moment barely have any appetite for beer.
As Simpson recounts an alarming festival experience the previous weekend—pogoing fan breaks leg, revelers disperse, band gawps in horror at a mosh pit swilled with blood—Exhilaration pelts forward so fast that wind pummels puddles from his eyeballs into his ears, like translucent mascara streaks. When we ease up for a U-turn, the guide points to a moored ship half-eaten by rust. It used to be a floating concert venue for stars like the Beatles and Elvis, she explains. Here are the shows Black Midi would stage, given custody of the rusty boat:
Simpson: [instantly] “Janet Jackson.”
Picton: “Cardi B, Rosalía, Megan Thee Stallion.” A ponderous pause. “And Ringo Starr.”
Greep: “Bring Macca back. Get Baz Luhrmann to do some Elvis shit. And Peter Criss, the Kiss drummer.”
U-turn completed, the driver catapults back to full speed. Before we can react, Simpson’s phone flies off his lap and smashes against the floor. “This guy is balling!” he cries out. Spritzing past the webbed dome of the O2 Arena, Exhilaration violently carves up and down the river, surf pellets splashing our faces. The boating playlist careens from the Weeknd into Dexys Midnight Runners, Madness into Robin S., Picton cheerfully mouthing along to “Show Me Love.” As we ease into the dock, Simpson jokingly scolds the driver: “You were playing with fire, man!”
Back on dry land, Black Midi prowl the promenade, seeking somewhere to snack. Simpson is dressed in some excellent orange corduroys recently obtained at a West London charity shop. Picton is snugly swaddled in a fluffy aquamarine jumper, his right ear glistening with a silver ring. When we arrive at a riverside gastrobar, Greep, in pinstripe trousers and a white shirt, unzips an uncharacteristically lowkey fleece and produces his prized Swiss Army kit: a miniature plastic sheath with slots for a nail file, scissors, tweezers, a knife (“lost that”), a ruler, the “smallest pen you’ve ever seen,” and a toothpick, which he says is “probably the most useful” of the bunch.
Given his propensity for charming anachronism, it is surprising that Greep is fantastic at Twitter. Along with excoriating Noel Gallagher (“His life is not worth living, absolute cunt”) and Coachella (“Cunts galore”), he is loud about what he loves—mostly modern boxers, actors including Gene Wilder and “everyone in The Wire,” and the puckish avant-pop duo Jockstrap. But his best online missives are shamelessly prickly, like this pitch-perfect spin on a curmudgeonly British tradition:
“I absolutely hate the moviegoer who, when watching a foreign or High-Brow film, squeezes out a guffaw, chuckle, smug ‘hm’ or soft ‘huh’ at any and every line with the slightest semblance to a joke. Insecure, dismal, oafish, pathetic behaviour of lost fools.”
When I mention all this online activity, he seems mildly invaded, as though a stranger were peering through his kitchen window. But as Picton’s painted fingernails flick the bar menu, I press for more shrewd cultural judgments. What do Black Midi think of Muse, I wonder?
A moment’s thoughtful silence, perhaps to confer telepathically. “With the stuff I’ve heard,” Simpson says finally, “there’s an element of fair play.”
Greep nods slowly. “I think they have a lot of parallels with Green Day,” he says, drawn in. “If you didn’t get into them at the time, they seem completely ridiculous. I can’t gauge what the good Muse is, the good Green Day. There’s something repellent about it.”
“They both kind of got lost in the sauce with money,” adds Picton. “That happens a lot with anyone that goes to stadium level. There’s a goofiness to them, but they’re both so sincere.”
Does the band find sincerity in general off-putting? “It’s important to be serious without taking yourself too seriously,” Picton reasons.
“In music and journalism, there’s a tendency to think in that dogmatic way,” agrees Greep, with a carefulness that suggests this has been on his mind. “People think because there’s jokes in our songs, we’re just messing around. But there’s a lot of design as well. Of course, once you start saying that, they’ll think the other way, that we’re too pretentious about it.”
Delusions of grandeur animate Hellfire finale “27 Questions,” a collision of Slint-style heaviness and rustic cabaret. Caught in a rainstorm in 1943, the song’s narrator ducks into a preposterously overblown theater spectacle, where a fictional actor named Freddie Frost twirls out of a “gold-green sarcophagus” to warble a set of existential puzzlers. “Does there exist a marriage that can survive castration?” trills Greep, in character as Frost, with comically impeccable diction. “In Heaven, do the morals of Earth still stand?/ Or can I bridge the gap ’twixt beast and man?”
Perhaps Frost is a self-deprecating satire of Greep himself—the dreamer whose big ideas attract both scorn and begrudging admiration. Either way, Greep takes care to inject a dose of dramatic irony. Some of the character’s grand pronouncements “kind of make sense,” he says at the bar, “but a lot are depraved or wrong-headed. The level of vanity is so absurd and bizarre and funny. But that naivety, when it is delivered with complete sincerity, can have an emotional impact, while being absolutely, irredeemably dumb.”
A waiter slams down a platter of tapas, along with Aperol spritzes and a mysterious purple concoction in a Collins glass. Greep stops short, frowning. “Who’s double parking?” he asks.
Picton scans the bill. “Someone ordered a wild berry spritz.”
Simpson interrupts the burgeoning whodunit. “That’s definitely chorizo,” he says, confusingly. Heads turn. The drummer is wincing through a mouthful of what he thought was arancini, his day-old flirtation with pescetarianism thwarted.
“Seafood doesn’t even feel like eating an animal,” muses Greep, also a pescetarian, popping calamari into his mouth. “It feels like eating an alien.”
The wild berry spritz lingers on the table, undrunk and politely unreturned.
On Hellfire highlight “Welcome to Hell,” soldier Tristan Bongo, another wonderful Greep invention, recounts the horrors of war: “Limbs rendered birds by the speed they flew off/A soup nothingness that once was your best friend.” As a lieutenant orders Bongo to toughen up, guitars caterwaul across quaking drums and bass tremors. The album abounds with this gung-ho militancy, capped by Marta Salogni’s hyperkinetic production and—a first for the band—orchestral arrangements by Greep and Picton, including a part for a “Björk bird whistle” Salogni received for her work on the Icelandic star’s 2017 album Utopia.
Their sharpest left-turns go headlong into those tickling, storytelling lyrics. “With the last albums, maybe out of shyness or to make things seem more interesting, I’d always make it abstract,” says Greep. “What I found out was, you cannot underestimate an audience’s ability to come up with the naffest meaning possible.” His new style flings hapless characters into Nabokovian conundrums, like the farmhand seemingly conned into committing a random killing in “Dangerous Liaisons.” Stories leak into neighboring songs or call back to previous records. Greep hopes the Black Midi extended universe will “establish a confluence of intersecting points as we do more albums—like in comics, when this guy’s aware of that guy, even just tangentially. It’s good fun.”
In Picton’s “Eat Men Eat,” a sort of pastoral-hardcore hybrid, the mining company from his Cavalcade opus “Diamond Stuff” returns for a saga involving a dodgy dinner, an illicit affair, and the vengeance of a homophobic captain. “At the end, the captain curses the guys to a lifetime of crippling acid reflux,” Picton nonchalantly explains. For the coda, he issued an Instagram casting call for burps and layered them into a gastric chorus.
Nowhere was the band’s skepticism of seriousness more evident than on “Ded Sheeran (Ed Sheeran Send),” an unprovoked diss track set loose upon the internet for a few hours in 2020 before being whisked offline. An array of Britney Spears samples, ludicrous synth freakouts, and rap verses from all three members (“Ya boy Morgs, destroying ears,” spits Simpson) culminates in a takedown of “greedy piece of shit” Sheeran, including a claim of indeterminate sincerity that he stole Simpson’s drumsticks. Even more than the revelatory new album, the topic of Midi vs. Sheeran galvanizes the band. “We were chatting to someone who works at his label,” Simpson begins hesitantly, “and they mentioned—”
“He’s actually quite annoyed about it,” Greep chirps.
“They sent our publisher an email like, ‘This is out of order! Stay in your lane!’” adds Picton.
Greep and Simpson squawk with delight. A frisson enters the chat: the realization that, after three increasingly assured albums, fanbase cemented and record label in the tank, they can just about get away with saying—as Greep does now—“Fuck Ed Sheeran! We’re talking about Muse and Green Day, but Ed Sheeran takes the cake, man. It has to be the worst music of the last 100 years.”
The beatdown continues for several minutes before talk turns to an equally brutal Greep passion: the controlled chaos of a good boxing match. “It’s the closest thing to the thrill of listening to music,” he says. “In a great fight, you never know who’s gonna win; the two fighters are constantly shifting power dynamics. And when someone does get knocked out”—he leans back, eyes agleam, picturing the bloody scene—“man, there’s nothing like it.”
