It could be a little while before Black Midi release new music. Over the weekend, singer-guitarist Geordie Greep hosted an Instagram Live session and, at one point, wrote, “Black midi was an interesting band that’s indefinitely over.”
As Stereogum notes, the British group’s singer-bassist, Cameron Picton, wrote in a since-deleted post on X, on Sunday, August 11:
When reached by Pitchfork, a representative for the band said, “Black Midi are on a hiatus for now while they are working on solo projects.”
The news of Black Midi’s hiatus arrives as Geordie Greep is getting ready to play North American solo shows. The concerts take place in September in New York.
Geordie Greep, co-frontman Cameron Picton, drummer Morgan Simpson, and guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin formed Black Midi in London in 2017, having met at the performing arts institution Brit School. Citing influences that ranged from Danny Brown to the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Congolese soukous, the group emerged as leaders of a burgeoning experimental rock scene in the London underground, heralded by producer Dan Carey and his Speedy Wunderground label. The quartet, like many of its peers, attracted attention for its raucous shows at the Windmill in Brixton, as much informed by art-rock hooks and post-hardcore melody as Greep and Simpson’s time cutting their teeth in church bands around London.
Black Midi released their acclaimed debut, Schlagenheim, in 2019 via Rough Trade. Produced by Carey, the record combined noise-rock heft with nuanced instrumentation and Simpson’s helter-skelter rhythms. “We want to make it danceable,” Greep told Pitchfork that year. “At the end of the day, a good melody or rhythm is as exhilarating as a 20-minute drone.” After the departure of Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin, who took a break to focus on his mental health, the trio expanded in every direction with 2021’s Cavalcade, pinballing between metal scherzos, political screeds, cabaret waltzes, and baroque-rock.
Follow-up Hellfire further streamlined their knack for high-drama, showtune-style rock, turning Greep and Picton’s absurdist lyrical concerns into lucid, interlinking stories that established a sort of extended Black Midi universe. (As Greep explained, “With the last albums, maybe out of shyness or to make things seem more interesting, I’d always make it abstract. What I found out was, you cannot underestimate an audience’s ability to come up with the naffest meaning possible.”) Picton wrote a pastoral hardcore song about a mining company meeting their comeuppance in a homophobic tyrant; Greep closed the LP with an existential, Slint-go-cabaret mini-opera about a fictional actor called Freddie Frost.
The trio, still all 23, continued to perform with playful abandon, often peppering sets with covers of anyone from Tyler, the Creator to ABBA, Kate Bush, or Bruce Springsteen. Their final release to date, Live Fire, captured a festival show in Portugal; their final shows in this incarnation took place throughout 2023, concluding with a string of dates in South America.
