black midi Announce ‘Hellfire’
The UK-based trio of Geordie Greep (guitar, vocals), Cameron Picton (bass, vocals) and Morgan Simpson (drums) – announce their third album, ‘Hellfire’, out 15th July on Rough Trade Records, and headline shows at Somerset House & Central Park NYC.
In conjunction with the announcement, they share the album’s lead single/video, ‘Welcome To Hell’. Written in isolation in London after the release of last year’s Cavalcade, ‘Hellfire’ builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of its predecessor, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, ‘Schlagenheim’. As Greep describes it: “if ‘Cavalcade’ was a drama, ‘Hellfire’ is like an epic action film” that delves into overlapping themes of pain, loss and anguish. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet.
Whereas the stories of ‘Cavalcade’ were told in third person, ‘Hellfire’ is presented in first-person and tells the tales of morally suspect characters. There are direct dramatic monologues, flamboyantly appealing to our degraded sense of right and wrong. You’re never quite sure whether to laugh at or be horrified.
Today’s ‘Welcome To Hell’ tells the story of a shell shocked soldier’s excess and military discharge. The setting is a far-off military campaign – an exotic coastal town, commandeered by the invading army and swarming with soldiers. It is nighttime; erratic men rush up and down the strip in various stages of inebriation, neon signs light up the bars, and out of their open doors waft wisps of indeterminate smoke. Deafening howls of motorcycle engines linger all around, accompanied by a medley of languages – albeit, all slurred, coarse, hoarse and evasive of any true emotion and he’s unable to handle the world in which he finds himself. The track is soundtracked by funky guitar sections, driving horns and a progressively snarling vocal. It’s accompanying video was directed by Gustaf Holtenäs (who also directed the video for black midi’s ‘Slow’).
“Almost everyone depicted is a kind of scumbag,” says Greep. “Almost everything I write is from a true thing, something I experienced and exaggerated and wrote down. I don’t believe in Hell, but all that old world folly is great for songs, I’ve always loved movies and anything else with a depiction of Hell. Dante’s Inferno. When Homer goes to Hell in the Simpsons. There’s a robot Hell in Futurama. Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish writer who portrays a Satan interfering in people’s lives. There’s loads!”
The mysterious military mining corporation behind ‘Cavalcade’s’ ‘Diamond Stuff’ reappears in Cameron’s new song ‘Eat Men Eat’, and some of his best lyrics appear on the forcefully sweet ‘Still’, ‘Hellfire’s’ least abstract, most lyrically personal song. “There’s a lot of love and things like that on ‘Hellfire’,” says Cameron. ”There’s a tender flipside to every song. The dark comes out strongly, there’s Hell and Satan and murder and unsavoury things, but every song has both light and dark.”
Creating ‘Hellfire’ took six months, sprouting from a riff on one of the group’s oldest jams, which bloomed into the futuristic boxing drama, ‘Sugar/Tzu.’ The range, power and potent production of black midi’s music has never been greater than on ‘Hellfire’, partly thanks to producer Marta Salogni, who worked with the band on ‘Cavalcade’ opener, ‘John L.’ But, as always, the type of music black midi play isn’t as important as its quality. And whatever you think about black midi’s music isn’t as important as how you feel about it.
In November 2021, at the end of their celebrated US tour, black midi recorded a live album with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago capturing songs from across their catalogue. 6 of those songs will be pressed on 6 Flexi Discs (one song each), which will individually be available with a limited number of album pre-orders from specific retailers.
black midi play some of their biggest shows yet in support of this album, including concerts at London’s Somerset House, New York’s Central Park Summer Stage, Los Angeles’ The Wiltern, San Francisco’s The Warfield, Denver’s Ogden Theatre and First Avenue in Minneapolis. Experiencing the band live, feeling the power of the tension they carefully build up just before each explosive cathartic release, is essential to understanding black midi. Live, there’s Kaidi Akinnibi (brass) and Seth Evans (keyboards), summoning fearsome squalls of intensity at will. Morgan’s concussive percussion underlining everything, sometimes a boxer fighting a nightly bout with his kit, others silkily caressing the cymbals. Cameron, the still centre of a cyclone, waiting for those moments when the band feel inevitable, invincible, like “that massive lurching machine from Mad Max Fury Road”. And Geordie, stalking the stage, soaking up that exhilarating, combustible energy, pouring it all out through his microphone and guitar.
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