Geordie Greep is Ready to Go Global

2024 is the year of the Bro Vote, apparently. The New York Times and Politico both ran stories describing Donald Trump’s attempts to court votes from increasingly conservative, anti-Woke young men. Trump appeared on “Manosphere” podcasts; the Nelk Boys are funding a voter turnout program called “Send the Vote.” The sleaze-balls and assholes of your personal life are now coalescing into a voting bloc. Long-time fans of the London art-rock band black midi certainly did not expect that the literary, opinionated and often-anachronistic frontman Geordie Greep would enter this conversation. But it’s 2024—if we live in a world where Trump garners votes via the Talk Tuah podcast, then, what the hell, Greep can go full toxic bro, too.

Geordie Greep’s debut album as a solo artist is The New Sound—a record filled with vile and aggressive men complaining or demanding things. It’s about men who go to war, men obsessed with prostitutes, men obsessed with their own dicks, men obsessed with having women pretend to be obsessed with them. On “As If Waltz,” the narrator shares his fantasy with a woman he’s hired for sex: “To pretend I’ve more to say to you than, ‘How much?’ / To pretend we’ve more to do together than fuck.” In a passing metaphor on “The Magician,” Greep sings, “Like the man who pays his wife / 200 pounds to have sex / ‘Cause it’s the only way he can cum.” The characters on The New Sound are deeply, brilliantly unlikeable.

The album’s depictions of extremely toxic masculinity are certainly its immediate. When Greep yelps out the line “I’ll bet your pussy is holy, too,” it’s going to be the first thing from the album that sticks with you. The Sydney Morning Herald even called it a “classic album” for the “incel era.” But, the album also accomplishes something more opaque than its bro-centric satire. As much as The New Sound centers around its cast of unseemly characters, it also pushes back against any and all standards of what a solo indie rock album from a critical-darling band member should look like. Geordie Greep is in it for the long haul, and he’s tired of everyone else playing it so conventional—he’s eager to take a global approach. “When we were touring with black midi, we’d go to all these places that had such a rich musical tradition, lineage and current scene,” he says. “And I thought that it was a shame that we can’t really work with these people. And now that I’m in this new position, I’d really want to see how possible it is to work with all different people all around the world.”

With help from Fernando Dotta, the head of Brazilian label Balaclava Records, Greep recorded portions of The New Sound in Sāo Paolo and featured Brazilian musicians on lead single “Holy, Holy.” Greep’s solo debut is not a sudden left-turn away black midi’s dense, knotty, “musician’s music.” Tracks like “Walk Up” and “Motorbike” are in line with the band’s dissonant and complex compositions, but Greep’s collaborative efforts with Brazilian musicians also give it a bossa-nova lightness. “Terra” and “Through a War” pull from salsa; there’s a gloss to The New Sound that black midi never had.

And Brazil is only one stop on his global journey. Greep indicated interest in working with artists in Japan, New York, Western Africa and Eastern Europe. For him, making a solo album is never “a solitary endeavor ever. It’s always a collection of all these different talents and all these different people around the world.” He sees no reason to limit himself to any one sound, lineage, or continent. There’s both bravery and delicacy to handling this ambition, a balance that Greep is aware of. “People are maybe a bit insecure about working with people of a different background,” he says, “because, maybe, they feel like it’s like cultural appropriation or whatever it is. I don’t know what it is. But I feel like in music, true virtuosos—truly great musicians—in my experience, have been super open to different ways of doing things and trying things out. With music, you can try all sorts. There’s no right or wrong answer. I just want to try all sorts and see what happens.”

This willingness to experiment as a musician and collaborate with artists around the world is an approach that, at least in Greep’s perspective, is rare today. “I feel like there’s a lot of indie music where they almost wear their limitations like a badge of honor,” he posits. “And that’s fine! [With] a lot of great music, limitations make it better. But I feel like a lot of the limitations of the classic records are because the artists were aiming higher than what they could do. It wasn’t just that they were choosing to limit themselves.”

Greep continues, “You listen to Television’s Marquee Moon, that’s a classic landmark album, right? It’s not that they said, ‘Oh, we’re only going to play with clean guitars and we’re gonna do an indie rock style and play DIY.’ The guitar player was trying to sound like John Coltrane. He’s never gonna sound like John Coltrate! He’s not good enough. But him trying to sound like John Coltrane is bloody cool. He’s trying to do what he can’t do, and that’s where you get things that are interesting and genuinely ambitious. You can hear the cogs turning. I feel like there’s a lot of music made today, indie music, where they’re saying, “Oh, well we can never do that. So we’re just going to stay in our lane. We’re not going to try.” What’s the point of that?”

Lyrically, Greep is against the grain of contemporary indie music too. In another interview, he argued that “the things that get rated—the main virtue that people are looking for [in indie music]—is thought to be earnestness, subtlety and plainness.” black midi’s lyrics were often inscrutable narratives, so they fell into the “subtlety” category. In press interviews around black midi albums, Greep would face “an angle of questioning to, ‘Explain [themselves].’” But it’s impossible to listen to The New Sound without getting it. To use Greep’s own metrics, it’s not at all earnest: He spends too much of the album narrating an outsized, unrealistic caricature. It’s certainly not subtle, and he’s too loquacious to be plain. “I was not afraid to really branch out into several different directions,” he says. “And with the lyrics, [I wanted] to actually try and tackle something instead of making an abstract or inoffensive or easy-to-glaze-past lyric.”

In fact, the whole point is to reject the typical virtues of indie lyricism. There’s no personal narratives or stunning honesty here. The goal is not just to satirize the toxic bro; it’s to make something rebellious and fierce. “I’m just an ordinary guy. I’m just going along doing my thing,” Greep explains. “What have I got to tell anyone about my own personal life that’s going to be of much interest to them? I thought it was more interesting to explore these hypothetical scenarios and bombastic situations and see what we can all find out.” If he shares anything with his characters, it’s a sense of humor: “A lot of the punchlines are things I would’ve said in real life, thought of, or my friends might say. Someone will have a funny line, and then we just put it in, you know? It’s good to put something in there that has some bearing to reality.”

To assemble his cast of nightmarish men, Greep pulled from a variety of inspirations: Pale Fire by Vladamir Nabokov, Once Upon A Time In America, Andrew Tate. He’s particularly fascinated—and disturbed—by Tate’s disturbing braggadocio. “I saw a video of Andrew Tate, and he was like, ‘Bro, even ISIS is watching my videos. They messaged me to say they love my videos,’” Greep recalls. “And I was like, ‘What the fuck? What a random thing to brag about.’ That’s our world on Twitter. Everyone is scrounging for the most extreme thing they can say, or the most bizarre.” Ironically, Greep himself contributes to the endless pit of “extreme” things to say. On album opener “Blues,” he brags about a character: “And you have a bigger dick than any man who’s ever lived / And you can cum more than a hundred stallions.” Is there not something slightly Tate about the lyric?

Even the decision to disband black midi is a form of Greep’s protest against banalities. He refutes the expectation that bands should go on forever. “There are so many bands—indie bands—that have been going for like 20 or 30 years,” he says. “And that’s the assumption, [that they’ll keep going]. That’s par for the course. And I just don’t think I understand why that’s a common thing. I didn’t want to [be in black midi] for any longer than it felt urgent and vital.”

Geordie Greep’s shocking lyricism and the abrupt end of black midi have received most of the attention surrounding the release of his debut album. Plus, The New Sound has quickly been categorized as a statement on toxic masculinity, filtered through Greep’s dark humor—and that’s true. But, the album’s methods are just as curious and captivating as its topics; its mission statement is to blatantly reject the tropes of indie rock today. Greep is too curious as a musician, a writer and a listener to adhere to certain norms, and The New Sound is, in fact, quite old—the work of a musician straining against limitations and seeing what’s the most he can get away with before things snap.

Andy Steiner is a writer and musician. When he’s not reviewing albums, you can find him collecting ‘80s Rush merchandise. Follow him on Twitter.