Geordie Greep has a knack for proclamations. When the 25-year-old musician meets me at a bar in Soho, London, he barely speaks above a whisper over the course of our 90-minute conversation – a surprising contrast to the charismatic frontman of Black Midi he’s presented as for the past few years. But less than 10 minutes in he’s already dished out a handful of loosely interconnected mantras for modern life: “The metric of whether it’s a good bar is if you feel like it’s someone’s house”; “There’s no saying sorry in America – they think you’re taking the piss”; “The best thing about London is that everyone’s really nice – in America, everyone’s looking for a chance to get ahead”. Spend a day with Greep and you’d probably end up with a pamphlet’s-worth of rules on how to live.
Greep’s debut solo album – coming after he unceremoniously announced Black Midi’s disbandment on Instagram earlier this year – is its own proclamation, too: on the state of music, manhood and “The Greep”, the Brit School kid who in the space of a few short years became one of indie rock’s most feverishly loved and fervently hated frontmen. The album is called The New Sound though it’s actually a gloriously rendered pastiche of a lot of old sounds – Steely Dan studio sleaze, fizzy Tropicália, the dishevelled glamour and acerbic wit of early-60s Judy Garland.
“With Black Midi, a lot of the time people would say ‘I’m into it, but it’s a bit hard to listen to’, and I said, ‘Yeah, I can see what you’re saying,’” he says. During their tenure – seven years in which they hit the Top 30 of the UK albums chart, were Mercury prize-nominated, garnered a huge and rabid online fanbase, and were proclaimed the future of rock on both sides of the Atlantic – Greep always figured that confusing lyrics and obscured vocals weren’t a problem, because people could always “read the lyrics sheet. And one day I was like, ‘Wait, that is so dumb. Music is meant to be listened to. It’s for your ears, not for your brain.’ There’s no point in doing it if it’s not easy to listen to.”
It’s quite the turnaround for someone known for a deeply challenging fusion of math-rock, prog and avant-jazz. “I just don’t think that you should ever do anything exclusionary, or make it worse on purpose – there’s always the risk of that when you’re making experimental music,” Greep says, though he stops short of saying this was his former band’s intention. “With compromise, sometimes it really works, but often you end up with stuff that everyone thinks is OK, but no one thinks is really great. With some of the Black Midi stuff, a lot of people really like it, but no one loves it that much. I feel like the people that were really into the band were more into being a fan of the band than a fan of the music … being part of this club. It’s almost a religious vibe, more than actually liking the music.”
If any Black Midi fans haven’t warmed to Greep’s new style, you wouldn’t be able to tell based on how they’re reacting online. The New Sound’s lead single Holy Holy has been streamed over a million times, though some fans on Reddit wondered whether Greep’s lyrics – which inhabit a sleazy man who boasts of his conquests and tells a woman “I bet your pussy is holy, too” – were misogynist. Greep tries not to tailor his music to literal-minded people, but it’s hard not to notice the naysayers. He gives the example of Jimi Hendrix. “Now everyone thinks he’s the best guy ever, but when he was first playing gigs, the guys all chatting at the bar were probably saying all sorts of horrible or misguided things, but no one’s ever going to hear that,” he says. “Whereas with Twitter, everyone’s impressions are immortalised – every little thought they have about one song.”
The lead character of Holy Holy fits into an archetype that Greep explores again and again on The New Sound: the rich, empty-headed boozehound who’s obsessed with virility, burns through women like they’re cheap cigarettes, and spirals if he catches his reflection in the bottom of an empty glass. These men, Greep says, have taken over the internet. “I saw an Andrew Tate video where he was bragging about how even Isis watches his videos,” he says. “This is a cartoon world – crazy extremes have just become really normal. I thought it was worth looking into, or at least trying to make songs that find it tragic, this kind of thing.”
This new infestation of the mainstream internet is a frustration for Greep, who partially made his name on Twitter, where he became known for pithy posts pontificating on music history and day-to-day life. (On Do-Re-Mi, for example: “Doe a deer from The Sound of Music has an unexpectedly profound, quasi-Beckett third line, “me, a name I call myself”, very moving”.) The renamed X is “cool, but it’s gone really downhill. It’s been ruined by this idiot Elon Musk. It was once more similar to Reddit, but the people were less annoying. Now it’s just horrible, nasty, lowest-common-denominator videos.”
Although the lyrics on The New Sound may be satirical, the music itself feels totally earnest – Greep’s vocals, in the style of a Broadway performer, can be surprisingly gut-wrenching. “A lot of the time when stuff comes across as ironic, it’s really just unconfident,” he says. “It happens with a lot of bands these days: ‘Oh, I’m not quite sure about it, it’s kind of a joke’. You either underperform it, or play random stuff throughout, or do the lyrics in a detached way, because there’s a lack of genuine confidence in the product. That’s the way we did it in Black Midi a little bit, and that’s just how it goes – really young guys doing the band and it’s going really well, so there was a lot of unfocused irreverence, just being like: ‘It’s all just fun’. Musically, on this album, I’m playing it straight – and having confidence in the vision of it.”
Although Greep comes across as Black Midi-bashing, he continually reaffirms that he’s proud of what he accomplished with that band – while maintaining that it ended at the right time. “Musically, it got less and less interesting. We never rehearsed. So every time we did, you’d have to make up ground with our rapport, musically,” he says. “I’ve got nothing against them, and there’s nothing personal, but even when we were in the band, we were never best friends. It was never that kind of band.”
He thinks his announcement of the end – writing “Black midi was an interesting band that’s indefinitely over” in the comments of an Instagram Live stream – “was the wrong thing to do, probably,” but he’s also glad that there was a little bit of personality in it. “Almost every band, every personality, kind of behaves like a corporation – it’s like, everything is a press release,” he says. “I think it’s nice to just be yourself. I always like people to just express themselves how they would just chat to someone. It’s slightly condescending, this corporation speak.”
The New Sound, too, is an attempt to drop affectation and be more straightforward and human. “Much more than anything previous, it’s easy to listen to. I think people even just blindly listening to it would say, ‘This is OK’. It feels like the first time I’ve been truly successful in that. I probably say that every time,” he says, catching himself in another proclamation. “But it feels to me like a new step forward.”
