A Record That Refuses to Behave
There's a moment on Hellfire, I think it's somewhere in the middle of 'Sugar/Tzu', where everything is happening at once and it somehow coheres into something that feels like controlled demolition. I had to stop what I was doing the first time I heard it. Not because it was pleasant. Because it was alarming in the way that very good things sometimes are.
Black Midi have always been difficult to hold still. The London trio, Geordie Greep, Cameron Picton, Morgan Simpson, formed in 2017 and emerged from the Brit School for Performing Arts and Technology playing music that sounded like they'd eaten every genre and were violently expelling it all at once. Their debut Schlagenheim was angular and nervous. Cavalcade was stranger, more gothic, more orchestrated. Hellfire is where all of it becomes something genuinely frightening.
I've been trying to figure out why this record bothers me in the productive sense, why it sits in the back of my head like an unresolved argument. Part of it is Greep's voice, which occupies a register somewhere between storyteller and carnival barker, delivering narratives about war and death and moral collapse with an enthusiasm that's almost cheerful. There's no distance between the horror of the subject matter and the pleasure he takes in articulating it. That gap, or lack of one, is deeply unsettling and also very interesting.
Hellfire was recorded in thirteen days. That compression matters. The album has the quality of something caught rather than constructed, a document of a band at a particular pressure point rather than a careful assembly of parts. Rough Trade released it on 15 July 2022, and it landed with the force of something that had been building for a while and finally stopped holding back.
What Prog Never Was
People keep reaching for 'prog' when they talk about this band, and I understand the reflex, the time signatures, the compositional ambition, the sheer technical density of what's happening. But prog always had a certain smugness to it, a sense that complexity was its own reward. Hellfire doesn't feel smug. It feels genuinely unhinged in a way that prog, with all its precision, never quite managed.
Morgan Simpson is the best drummer working in rock music right now. I don't say that casually. There are moments where he is playing something structurally impossible and it swings. It has a physical quality that makes you want to move even when the music is technically uncomfortable. It's a rare thing: technique so complete it disappears and just becomes feeling.
The strings on this album are deployed like weapons. The brass comes in like a cavalry charge you weren't warned about. Kaidi Akinnibi's saxophone and Seth Evans on keyboards are not ornamental. They're load-bearing. The record needed those voices to do what it does, which is to oscillate between baroque density and something rawer, something almost physically violent. Underneath all of it, there's something you might call a groove if you were feeling generous, something rhythmically alive that keeps the whole chaotic enterprise from collapsing into pure noise. That's the skill, the thing that separates this from mere difficulty. They know exactly how far to push before pulling back, and the push is always exactly calibrated.
The First Person and What It Costs
Cavalcade told its stories in the third person. Hellfire shifts everything into the first person. That's not a small decision. It changes the relationship between singer and material completely. When Greep sings about violence, collapse, moral wreckage, he's not narrating it from a safe distance. He's inhabiting it. The result is a collection of songs that feel confessional in the worst possible way, confessional about things no one should be confessing to, delivered with the cadence and confidence of someone who has worked out exactly what they believe.
Greep's accent has been described as geographically unclassifiable. That quality, of not belonging to one specific place or class register, suits the material perfectly. These songs are set nowhere in particular and everywhere at once. 'Eat Men Eat', 'Welcome To Hell', 'Dangerous Liaisons', 'The Defence', the titles alone read like dispatches from a civilization in the process of being comprehensively dismantled. The ten tracks on this record don't offer consolation. They offer clarity, which is the harder gift.
The Track That Defines the Album
'Sugar/Tzu' is the centerpiece and the proof. It is where every claim this band makes about itself gets tested and holds. The track moves through sections that would be entire songs for other bands, each one dense enough to be load-bearing on its own, and it does this without feeling like a suite or a medley or a display of compositional range. It feels like one continuous thought that keeps arriving at new conclusions. The momentum Simpson generates underneath it is not the momentum of a drummer keeping time. It's the momentum of something structural, something that's holding the architecture upright while the architecture does things it has no right to be doing.
The first time through, the track is disorienting. The third time through, it starts to feel inevitable. That shift, from alarming to inevitable, is what separates a great record from a difficult one. Hellfire is great. The difficulty is the point, but the greatness is not reducible to it.
The Rock Question
I've been asked, more times than I'd like, whether I think rock music is dead. It's a tedious question and usually I deflect it. But Hellfire makes me feel something I don't often feel listening to guitar music, which is that the form still has genuine capacity for surprise. Not nostalgia surprise, not 'they sound like something we loved before' surprise, but actual 'I didn't know music could do this' surprise.
That's rare. Most rock music made now is either explicitly retro, self-consciously innovative in a way that announces itself too loudly, or just competent and airless. Black Midi are none of those things. They play like the history of rock music is material to be wrecked and rebuilt rather than reverence to be maintained.
Hellfire is not an easy listen. It won't play nicely in the background. It demands something from you and doesn't apologize for it. I find that kind of demand increasingly scarce and increasingly welcome.
I've been playing it on and off for months now and it hasn't settled into something comfortable. It's not supposed to. That's not a problem.
The rock question I keep getting asked doesn't have a simple answer, but Hellfire makes the answer more interesting than a simple no or yes. If rock music means a white guy with a guitar doing something you've heard before, then maybe it's dead. If it means the willingness to take the electric guitar and the rock band configuration and drive them somewhere genuinely new, then Hellfire is evidence of continued life, continued possibility, continued capacity for surprise.
I'll take that evidence. I'll take it and play the record again.
