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 — emerged from the Brit School a few years back 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 a enthusiasm that's almost cheerful. There's no distance between the horror of the subject matter and the pleasure he seems to take in articulating it. That gap — or lack of one — is deeply unsettling and also very interesting.
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 might be the best drummer working in rock music right now. I don't say that casually. There are moments where he seems to be playing something structurally impossible and yet 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. And 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 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. I'm not sure it's supposed to. I'm not sure that's 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.
