Welcome to Hell: The unusual legacy of Black Midi
There’s a case to be made that there hasn’t been a more impactful band to have emerged from the United Kingdom in the last five years than Black Midi.
Rising out of the fabled ‘Windmill scene’ in south London that encompasses a wide variety of bands that regularly perform at the Brixton venue of the same name, Black Midi were one of the weirdest and wildest groups in the loose collective, and yet they’re the band that achieved the most fame worldwide, garnered a rabid fanbase in the process, and received a Mercury Prize nomination for their debut album, Schlagenheim. And yet, just five years after they burst into life on this game-changing record, they’re no more.
Where it all went wrong is perhaps the wrong line of inquiry to follow, as the young age at which they suddenly became the talk of the town and the intensity with which they operated as a group always made people sceptical of just how long a band like Black Midi could realistically survive. The better and more appropriate question to ask would be: just how exactly did it go right?
Not everyone was a fan of what Black Midi had to offer to the world, and many detractors were quick to hurl insults at them for their musical endeavours. From having a vocalist in Geordie Greep who enunciated his words in a garbled sprechgesang that many likened to that of an auctioneer on amphetamines to producing a racket that refused to ever stay in one lane for longer than 30 seconds, they certainly weren’t ever aiming to appeal to everyone. It wasn’t just a small minority who despised them, and it’s perfectly understandable that a band of Black Midi’s ilk were going to be met with a reasonable amount of disdain.
Yet, in spite of having rubbed many listeners up the wrong way, their electric style that fused together noise, progressive rock and post-punk in a relatively novel fashion seemed to strike a chord with others, and throughout three albums, they pushed themselves to such extremes that it led to both their stratospheric rise and eventual implosion. Within mere months of the release of their earliest singles, hordes of fans began to congregate in online circles, shows began to heave with sweaty bodies thrashing around to their hectic cacophony, and countless imitators surfaced.
Considering how other equally eccentric acts from past decades, such as Cardiacs or Boredoms, predictably never really found their way into the mainstream and were only ever able to achieve cult status, we’re forced to return to the question of just why and how the experimental nature of Black Midi piqued the interest of the younger generation in a way that caused them to be recognised as the lynchpin of a burgeoning scene, or why it was them that reignited the interests of older fans of bands like King Crimson or Can in a way that others in decades prior hadn’t been able to.
After the release of Schlagenheim, founding member Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin departed and left Black Midi as a trio of Greep, bassist Cameron Picton and drummer Morgan Simpson, and while they released two further albums in Cavalcade and Hellfire, they went on a period of absence in 2023 with little to no mention of new music being on the horizon. In August 2024, Greep decided to announce on an Instagram Live broadcast that Black Midi was no more, and only a matter of days later, he announced the release of his debut solo album, The New Sound, effectively hammering the nail into the band’s coffin.
Speaking with Far Out about his motivations to go alone, he said that he’d been desiring to push things further in multiple directions and that the songs he had been writing prior to making the record warranted “a different approach than working just in a band.” Considering the Latin jazz fusion sound that permeates its way through The New Sound, it’s evident that Greep strived to do more than the rest of the band weren’t as interested in pursuing, and yet, despite how radically different it shaped up to be, it was still met with the same overwhelmingly positive reception from fans and disgusted uproar from those who didn’t gel with his previous project.
Given the reception of Greep’s first solo outing, you have to expect a similar response will be in the pipeline for the other former members’ first forays into recording solo or with other projects, but the fact that a band can create such an alienating sound and still accomplish what some acts that specifically tailor their music towards the mainstream fail to do proves that they managed to tap into something at just the right time.
No matter how bemusing they were as a group, their legacy will continue for as long as they keep pursuing their own projects, and with that, there will be plenty of other acts who will feel confident that they can create boundary-pushing music that can enthral audiences on a wide scale.
