Geordie Greep
The New Sound 2LP

“The main theme of the record is desperation; you don’t hear an unreliable narrator but someone who is kidding themselves that they have everything under control, but they don’t.” Geordie Greep

Geordie Greep (guitarist and vocalist in black midi) releases his debut solo album The New Sound.

Following three astonishing albums with black midi, most recently 2023’s Hellfire, and almost non-stop worldwide tours for near-on five years, Geordie Greep has somehow found time to record his first solo album The New Sound, an album that has allowed him scope to explore creative ideas like never before. It boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time. Geordie Greep; “With recording The New Sound, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. And with every impulse I had, I was able to completely follow it through to its conclusion. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it's good to do something else, to let go of things.”

Over thirty session musicians were involved in the making of the album, on two continents, in São Paulo and London. Geordie Greep; “Some of the tracks we had recorded already, elsewhere, but it just wasn’t right, so we re-recorded them with new people. Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They’d never heard anything I’d done before, they were just interested in the demos I’d made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days. Then we did the overdubs later, in London.” 

Geordie Greep has had plenty of practice with black midi over the years in performing musical and lyrical Cruyff turns, full of stop-starts, blasts and bangs and whispered soliloquies. Here the method is employed to ask: what part of the narrative should we listeners believe, or take as our emotional crutch? The mercurial, insouciant tone set in ‘Terra’, or the gruesome imagery it is juxtaposed with? After all, Greep tells us, this is the story of “the museum of human suffering.” Consider, too, the strange emotional undulations created in ‘Through a War’, where the music makes a very polished stab at aping a soul revue; or a salsa class. It’s there to give colour to a set of imaginings which include cannibalism, being boiled alive, and a woman giving birth to a goat. You’re never quite sure when, or whether, you are supposed to be shocked; or laugh. Even if, as with the latter, Geordie Greep gives us the punchline; “And that’s how I spent my adolescence.”

NEW / Released in 2024

Tracklist:

A1 Blues

A2 Terra

A3 Holy, Holy

B4 The New Sound

B5 Walk Up

B6 Through A War

B7 Bongo Season

C8 Motorbike

C9 As If Waltz

D10 The Magician

D11 If You Are But A Dream