Black Midi’s thrillingly unclassifiable racket has earned them industry hype unheard-of for a guitar band today. So how did the diehard experimentalists emerge from the same talent school as Adele?
Inside a dilapidated, labyrinthine building in the outer reaches of south-east
London, Black Midi are posing for photographs – a shoot that is 99% stony-faced nonchalance, 1%
comedy boxing demonstration. This is the band’s new rehearsal space, and the establishment’s manager ambles over to let everyone know the score. This place is “under the radar”, he says meaningfully, waving a spliff around with an air of vague menace. Inside, the foursome – a group of baby-faced, scrupulously polite 20-year-olds – helpfully rearrange their practice room into an interview-friendly configuration while talking up their new base. “This whole place has only just started up,” says de facto frontman Geordie Greep. “So we’re pioneers!”
Really, it isn’t through the use of rough and ready rehearsal spaces that Black Midi are breaking new ground. Instead, it’s their noisy and thrillingly unpredictable guitar music. Their debut album, this year’s Schlagenheim – which this week competes against favourites Slowthai, Dave and Idles for the Mercury prize – saw them wrestle novelty from the creaky guitar-bass-drums framework, creating catnip for
music fans struggling to come to terms with rock’s cultural decline. Their sound feels impossible to place, a quality that has, predictably, seen music critics and nerdy
YouTube commenters scramble to place it – usually landing on some combination of King Crimson, Butthole Surfers, Swans, Death Grips and Slint. It is a fun science: a friend describes them as “Parquet Courts meets the Darkness”. They remind me of early PiL and Captain Beefheart, but also of the ambience of the internet – a cacophonous, always shifting stream of sonic information that feels spellbinding in part because you can’t tell what’s coming next.