The incel era finally has its first classic album

With his brush dipped in repulsion, shame, disgust and irony, Geordie Greep could paint you a rainbow. Or, more likely, the aural equivalent of the provocative Toshio Saeki portrait that marks the cover art of his new album.

On Holy, Holy, a slimy lothario attempts to seduce a woman with come-ons so oily you could fry in them. “Of course, you know my name/ the barmaids know my name, I’ve had them all before,” he sings over a menacing salsa rhythm dripping in desperation.

Geordie Greep: The Black Midi frontman has made a bonkers record populated by despicable men.Credit: Yis Kid

On Through a War, a cabaret production of a song, a modern major general in a bout of PTSD boasts of his conquests, both military and sexual. “You gave me nothing but an incurable disease, for which I’m so glad/ You’ll always be with me,” he sings.

On Walk Up, an ambitious corporate riser realises everything he’s worked towards has been a sham. “In the boardroom, your fish fingers shake hands with the top flight men,” Greep screeches like the Fall’s Mark E. Smith while a free jazz breakdown creates an exhausting cacophony.

These are just some of the grotesque characters that populate the former Black Midi frontman’s solo debut, The New Sound – an album about hideous men, macho ego, and the shame and despair that roil below the surface of the most cocksure. Not most people’s idea of fun perhaps, but Greep makes it a hoot.

So what’s the appeal of writing an entire album from the perspective of pathetic men? “Dunno, it’s not very often done, you know?” the 25-year-old deadpans from his London home, in the staccato accent that’s become his idiosyncratic signature. “I had a few of these songs with these tones and environments, and I thought, well, why not? Let’s go fully down this rabbit hole and explore this.”

Like an internet-age Greg Dulli but arch, Greep delights in skewering The New Sound’s cast of creeps and degenerates. With a nutso sonic landscape that’s somewhere between Steely Dan, Hector Lavoe and Andrew Lloyd Webber, these are operatic anthems for the incel era, a soundtrack for the prevailing crisis of masculinity, where someone like Andrew Tate’s become a legitimised thing.

‘At some point you have to say, well, why does this song actually exist, other than to take the piss out of people or just be stupid?’

In interviews, Greep has said the main theme of the record is desperation. He likens its tragic characters to Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard: twisted, deluded, undesired. “I’ve always been attracted to that in music, this notion of yearning, where it’s something you’re reaching but you can’t get,” he says. “That’s lyrically and with the music I’m trying to emulate, as well. There’s always that tension.”

Tension is central to The New Sound, for Greep can’t resist nuance. If on Holy, Holy, you’re laughing at the picture he paints of one man’s gross sexual desperation, on closer If You Are But a Dream – “I long to kiss you! But would not dare/ I’m so afraid that you may vanish in the air,” he croons majestically – you feel a tinge of sympathy for the same dude, lost in his solemn fantasy.

“That’s the whole thing, you can’t let it completely become an ironic thing or a pessimistic thing or a satirical thing, because you lose a bit of the actual heart of it,” Greep says. “At some point you have to say, well, why does this song actually exist, other than to take the piss out of people or just be stupid? That’s why, in the same sentence sometimes, you’re laughing, you’re repulsed, and you also feel sorry. I wanted to make those things as hard to distinguish as possible.”

Raised in Walthamstow in East London, Greep rose to indie-fame as the frontman of acclaimed UK prog-rock weirdos Black Midi. The band went on indefinite hiatus following their third album Hellfire, released in July 2022, prompting Greep’s solo pivot. Oddly, for a band whose anything-goes time signatures and freak-out shifts from punk to showtunes always indicated artistic expression at its freest, Greep says he felt properly limitless for the first time making The New Sound.

“There’s always compromise when you’re in a band, right? No matter how supposedly free you are. Because no one’s word is gospel and you have to come to agreements, it can end up being slightly limiting,” he says. “There was always this unspoken thing of, ‘What’s the band’s sound? We have to be faithful to the band’s sound and not mess around with that.’... So sometimes what you’re making doesn’t end up sounding that forward-thinking or pushing boundaries.”

The joy of recording solo is that if you happen to regret, say, that harpsichord breakdown in the middle of your eight-minute waltz about a guy falling in love with the disinterested sex worker he hired for an hour (As If Waltz), there’s no one else to blame but yourself.

“It’s a pretty nice feeling of, ‘Well, if I mess it up, it’s all my fault, which means I’m just rubbish!’” says Greep. “That’s good because it’s not like it goes wrong and you say, ‘Oh, it would’ve been good if you didn’t do that or if he didn’t do this.’ It’s just, what have you got to lose?”

The New Sound borrows its cover art from the late provocative Japanese illustrator, Toshio Saeki.

As such, Greep goes for it on The New Sound, the ever-challenging instrumentation veering from post-punk riffs to Baroque romanticism to prog-wankery. There are also Latin rhythms galore, a nostalgia-trip inspired by the childhood nights he used to spend with his mum at the London salsa bar she worked at.

“Because there was no one home to watch us, me and my sister would have to just sit in the back room. It was this funny, sleazy place, with super loud music just coming through those walls. When you’re a kid it’s like, ‘Why would someone listen to this, man?’ The music is so over the top the whole time,” Greep says of his journey with salsa. “But now I love it. It’s that whole thing of how technically complicated it is, while still being accessible and just so slick.”

As with Black Midi, The New Sound feels vehemently anti-commercial; half the tracks push past six minutes (with one double that), filled with intricate instrumentation and spitting verbiage. It makes you wonder: does Greep ever listen to straight pop music? The floodgates open.

“Not really, man. The thing is with pop music of the last 20 years, it’s so compressed that you listen for two minutes and I find it tiring, right? The whole time it’s just like, pssssssssht, blaring out! I know this is a memey thing to say, like ‘Oh, what’s happened to the tunes!’ and all that, but I don’t think there’s any one thing that’s bad about the production of modern music, I think there are lots of little things that are terrible, adding up to make it all have this sound which is quite annoying to listen to.

“I mean, if you’re used to it and if that’s the kind of music you listen to, it probably sounds fine. But if you mainly listen to music from, you know, however long ago, where it’s a natural recording of a live band or whatever, then to hear this stuff which is really manufactured and has all these things on it to make it perfect as possible, to make it as least real as possible, it just sounds weird. It’s the same in modern films where they all have this look where it’s super processed and super treated and you can tell it’s got a million effects and a million plugins. It’s cool, but it’s not my kind of thing.”

Ok. But what if something good’s on the radio, it doesn’t catch your ear?

Greep sighs. “Sure, but it catches it in a way that’s like…,” he grimaces. “You know one thing I hate, yeah? This happens in lots of modern music. They have this thing where there’s, like, a ballad or whatever, and the singer is just gonna be screaming the whole time! Like that song, Lewis Capaldi or whatever. He’s just screaming - baaaaaaaah!! It’s like, woah man, it’s not that bad. Get into the song a bit and then do that, but right from the very beginning? Geez. Just like stuff like that, man. Yeah, I just can’t get into it.”

Geordie Greep’s The New Sound is out now.

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