Geordie Greep, the 25-year-old musician striking out on his own after seven years with English avant-rock favorites Black Midi, is sitting in one of Frank Sinatra’s old haunts in New York City, sipping an afternoon martini and discussing how, on his solo debut, The New Sound (out Oct. 4), he really wanted to sing.
“There’s that phrase that a band’s only as good as its drummer; well, a singer’s only as good as the song,” Greep says. “At one point, I thought, ‘Wait, if I’m singing this music, there’s no use being insecure or shy about it — go for it.’ I think there’s a tendency in experimental music to do this great instrumental, but the singing we’ll do a bit looking off to the side, like an afterthought. And it’s like, listen — in songs, singing is the main thing. Why not go for it? Really work on it and pay attention to it. Get the right takes.”
The right vocal take for the album’s latest single, “Blues” — premiering today on Rolling Stone — was the first one. “First time even singing the lyrics,” Greep says. “It was all very impromptu, and it was the sort of thing where it was like, finish the take — ‘Nah, probably not gonna get it better than that.’”
“Blues,” like a lot of Greep’s music, moves at a frenetic, off-kilter pace, and this one can feel particularly labyrinthian, propelled through its various sections by manic bass and guitar riffs and the spitfire drumming of Greep’s old Black Midi bandmate, Morgan Simpson. But as the title suggests, “Blues” is actually a pretty basic blues song — “You have one chord for a bit, go to the next chord for half as long, then back to the first chord,” Greep says.
Lyrically, the song paints a portrait of someone we’ve all known, and maybe at one time or another in our multi-faceted, ever-changing, ever-growing lives, have been ourselves: “I wanted to do a song where it’s like, ‘Oh, look at this wanker — then again, we’re all kind of wankers,’” Greep quips. “We’ve all been 18. I wanted to do a song about when you think you’re the shit, and you have this feeling when you’re walking down the street, and you can imagine it’s a movie. Like, what a wanker! It’s just a load of funny lines strung together, really, with the theme of like 18-year-old pretentiousness.”
Greep shapes this character with a wonderfully theatrical vocal performance, locking onto a storyteller’s sing-song patter as he leans into lines that can be grotesque, funny, and tragic — often all three at once: “And you have a bigger dick than any man who’s ever lived/And you can cum more than 100 stallions/In a room that smells of cigarettes and carrion/Under sheets freezing cold with damp.”
Eventually, Greep steers this wanker’s blues towards an existential crisis that’s part cosmic apocalypse, part visceral body horror, and consumed fully by the only realization that matters: “Soon you’ll disappear/That’s the only fact.”
I meet up with Greep in early September. He’s chosen P.J. Clarke’s — a saloon that’s been sitting on the northeast corner of Third Ave. and 55th St. since 1884 — because Sinatra used to hang out here, and Sinatra’s one of his favorite singers.
“It’s that classic school of technique, of diction — you can hear every word,” he says. “It’s a corny thing to say, but when he says something, you do listen.” A little while later, he elaborates on the influence of that style on his solo debut: “I had this thing where, if the lyric was a bit obscure, I’d be like, ‘It’s fine, you can always read the lyric sheet.’ And then I was like, ‘That’s such bullshit — if you can’t get the lyric by listening to a song, then it’s probably not a very good song.’”
Greep is in New York City for a residency of sorts showcasing The New Sound ahead of its release: Four gigs in four nights at four different venues, from jazz clubs to punk haunts, all with a band he’s never played with before. He assembled the group via Instagram, finding a keyboard player and drummer and then asking who they played with. Soon enough, he had his backing quartet: Percussionist Santiago Moyano, drummer Charlie Schefft, bassist David Strawn, and keys player Cameron Campbell.
“I’m just trying to build as many connections, so wherever I am in the world, I’ll know people,” Greep says. He’s mulling the possibility of having different bands in every major territory he tours, giving fans in certain countries or cities the chance to see friends play, and also allowing “the music[to] develop in a different way.”
This mindset was crucial to the creation of The New Sound. Greep had spent several years writing these songs, and a couple (“The Magician” and “Walk Up”) had made it into Black Midi’s live sets. But he still felt this material warranted a different approach. Last fall, he did a session in London with Simpson on drums and Seth “Shank” Evans — a frequent Black Midi collaborator and producer of The New Sound — on bass; three songs came out of it, including “Blues,” but it was still “familiar territory” for Greep.
With this new music drawing heavily on salsa and Latin big band music, he started thinking about which players around London he could bring in next — until he remembered Black Midi had a few tour dates in Brazil coming up. So Greep booked a studio for his off-day and called up the one guy he knew in Brazil, Fernando Dotta, who runs the label Balaclava Records and helped him assemble a group of musicians.
“There was a lot riding on it,” Greep says, “and it was scary to commit to paying musicians and booking the studio before I’d even played with them or knew them. But as soon as we heard them, I just felt, ‘Ah fuck, this is great.’ It was one of the best days of my life — hearing it right there and knowing I was gonna be OK.”
This moment was as much a beginning as it was an end. After returning from South America, Black Midi played what would be their final show in London on Dec. 19, 2023. No formal break-up or hiatus announcement was made, and Greep only confirmed the split on Instagram Live in August. But Greep says, by that point last year, it’d been “obvious for a long time that none of us were enjoying the band that much. It was going well — we were doing shows, it was kind of fun — but we weren’t coming up with much material.”
Greep knew he wanted to go solo in the same way: “You want to go to space or win the Grand Prix.” Making an album of his own was, admittedly, a more attainable dream, but still, he hadn’t actually done it yet. That day in Brazil relieved any anxieties still lingering about taking that step. And, on the other side, he found a new creative freedom, too.
“When you’re working in a group,” Greep says, “there’s always this thing of not being sure if you’re stepping on someone’s toes. There’s a tentativeness. Always. So when I was doing it on my own, I just thought, well, it’s all or nothing. If this is crap, it just means I’m crap — and that’s a great feeling. It’s like, who cares? What have I got to lose?”
That’s a liberating feeling — one Sinatra once sang about, in terms of love, yes, but the same could apply to art. The feeling all, or nothing at all.
From Rolling Stone US
