Geordie Greep on His Solo Career, Bad Music Videos, and the Truth Behind the black midi Breakup

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I love Geordie Greep's solo debut The New Sound, which hits digital shelves this Friday; it scratches a lot of itches that I didn't know existed, and invites insane comparison points like "What if Battles were obsessed with Donald Fagen's 'The Goodbye Look'?" As a critic, I always felt like I was at arms' length with black midi's music—I respected what they were doing but wanted to be into it more than I actually was—but in terms of songwriting and pure sonic overload, The New Sound is genuinely thrilling to me, and I feel like I discover new things with every successive listen.

When I pitched a newsletter interview to his reps, I was quite surprised to hear that he wanted to go on a rowboat ride in Central Park; I was even more surprised that, throughout our 90-minute conversation, he gamely kept cranking at the oars without breaking a sweat (listen, I have to conduct the interview, you can't possibly expect me to do the rowing) and seemed genuinely energized by the entire endeavor. I got the sense that he has a real passion for whatever he throws himself into, and even though being trapped on a rowboat with someone you barely met for the length of a feature film might seem like a nightmare, I think we both had a pretty solid time in conversation. Check it out:

The fact that we're about to go on a boat is funny to me. black midi did the same thing with Pitchfork back in 2022. Do you just really like boats?
Boats is a good little vibe. I've always wanted to do this and it's cool. So this is for Last Donut of the Night, huh?

Yeah, I started the newsletter back in 2020 and I was trying to figure out what the name of it was. I went with an easy name just because I love J Dilla's Donuts. Do you?
Yes, especially how he's got that [siren] sound effect going on every track. I love stuff like that—it's kind of ridiculous, or, not ridiculous, but almost a bit of a novelty.

I feel like whenever I'm talking to people from the UK, they have a reverential feeling towards J Dilla that rivals how he's regarded in the U.S. Why do you think that is?
Well it goes quite a lot into UK hip-hop. UK electronic music, it's probably the biggest influence. I don't know if this is the reason, but him and a few other guys sample loads of UK music—extraordinary deep cuts that gives it this nice sound. It's what's great about him. He'll sample, like, a deep funk record, or some rare group stuff, or Genesis or Frank Zappa.

What's your relationship with rap been over the years?
I don't know. There's some stuff I've liked over time. The thing I like about music is chord changes, and with a lot of rap music, it's just not really a thing. It's a beat that goes along, and then they have a rapper rapping over it. The last guy in rap music that I was obsessed with was Danny Brown. I loved Danny Brown. The production that Paul White did was awesome, too.

A lot of the recent American rap has a more chord-y feel to it—like melodies fed through neon sludge.
Like, super blown-out?

Yeah. I always think of it as how it must feel when you're on too much drugs—like Ariel Pink's music, maybe.
It's a shame about him, though. He went a bit nuts, huh?

He was always that way. When I interviewed him back in the day, I was like—
"What's going on with this guy?"

Yeah. He's obviously troubled, and I think when an outsider artist is given outsized attention like that, they start to panic and push people away. That's kind of what happened with Mark Kozelek, too.
Oh yeah—another shit show.

Some people want to be alone, but being alone is overrated too, I think.
Yes, definitely. There's a sort of pressure to build a whole thing, too. I saw him live 10 years ago, it was really unique. He was doing this whole thing where he was writing songs the night before he played them. Each song would be like, "I'm on the train to Dublin, and now I'm in the UK again," but to such an extreme extent. It was almost like social media, only a guy doing it straight off the dome. A virtuoso playing with real virtuoso musicians.

I think this new record's great. What's your relationship to Donald Fagen's The Nightfly? It's one of my favorite records of all time, and the first time I listened to The New Sound, I was like, "Damn, he's really going for a Nightfly thing with this."
With The Nightfly, you put it on and it sounds like nothing else. There's this weird synthesizer where the main patch is a really weird sound. There's certain sounds—analogue synths and stuff—that just sound nice, and when everyone hears them, they're like, "Oh, that's a nice sound, that's a good piece of gear," and all that. But The Nightfly doesn't really have that sound when you first put it on—it's very digital, it's very cold.

I didn't listen to it for ages, but when I finally did listen through it, I was like "Oh, this is brilliant." I even prefer it to Steely Dan. It's just banger after banger, really. You can just keep putting it on again and again, you know? He really went down the slick road even more than on Gaucho.

What was your moment where you discovered Steely Dan as a listener?
I heard Aja when I was 14. I like fusion, I like prog, so I liked Aja. I was like, "This is great." It's the kind of album where I didn't want to like it at first, because it's really cheesy in a way, compared to a lot of stuff. It's just different than a lot of music, and it's easy to make fun of. People are coming around in a huge way now, but for a while they were, like, a joke.

One thing that keeps getting brought up with your music as of late is showtunes. Tell me about your relationship with that distinctive musical style.
I think modern musicals are pretty crap. In the last 30 or 40 years, there's been this weird way of singing with this whiny American accent that's totally over the top. I can't believe anyone genuinely likes that. It seems like a lack of being exposed to other things or something.

So many of them are jukebox musicals as well.
Exactly. What's the point of that? They're doing shit versions of, like, the Beach Boys, or whatever the fuck. Completely pointless. But there is a charm to stuff like West Side Story and old classic stuff. It's probably the reason people get into show tune stuff. I love the classic jazz standards, basically—stuff like "All the Things You Are," Kurt Weill, "Mack the Knife." All that has been been a big influence the whole time—I've been trying to basically do that kind of thing, like Tom Waits and all these funny versions of these songs.

As soon you're doing something theatrical, people are like, "This is like musical theater." It's more just like David Bowie or whatever—loads of people have done that.

Were you a musical theater kid when you were younger?
No, not really. I used to go to a drama club after school, but that was more just running around, basically.

What about just acting or inhabiting a persona? It sounds like there's a lot of that in your recent lyricism.
Definitely—playing around and just doing stuff. I can't lie at all. I've never been good at lying. But playing around and doing little games and stuff, everyone likes that when you're a kid. It's good stuff.

What was your number one way to amuse yourself when you were a kid?
Oh, man. All sorts of random things, like opening a door and closing the door for half an hour. Going to music pretty early on, when I was eight years old. Watching movies.

What movies have you been drawn to in general?
All sorts. New York, that's a very movie town, isn't it? Once Upon a Time in America and all.

I just watched that one.
It's great.

It's really wild, man. I gotta say, I was taken aback by all the rape stuff. Well, it's the one gangster film where—they always like to say this thing about, "It's not glamorizing it, because their lives don't work out well." Well, kind of, but Henry Hill, all the Goodfellas guys, like they still seem like G's. By the end of Once Upon a Time in America, you don't give a fuck about these guys. Over time, you have that journey with the character that's really powerful. Sergio Leone, all the time they're doing crazy stuff in that movie. The telephone part, at the beginning, when a phone keeps ringing through five different scenes. You don't know what's going on, someone picks up, and it's a whole thing. It's an amazing film.

The glamorizing behavior thing makes me think of The Wolf of Wall Street, which is an incredible film to me. It's almost a horror film yeah in terms of how men are, but when I saw it in theaters I was like, "Well, no one's gonna think of this as model behavior." It turns out that people do!
Bro, there's loads of stuff like that. "Born in the USA," Taxi Driver—people watching it and being like, "Yeah, fair enough, It's cool." People take the wrong lessons. You can never underestimate how wrongly they can take things.

When "Holy Holy" came out, there was a lot of conversation online about the lyrics. Across the record, I took a lot of your lyrics as this investigation into the cross-sections between sex, masculinity, and misogyny. I'm curious to hear you talk about the sex and masculinity stuff on this record, because it's quite pervasive.
Thing is, I just thought that lots of people were talking about this stuff, and it seems like we're in a weird point of history where, with Twitter, people are being driven to such extremes of what you're used to seeing, and the extent to which people can really be whacked out. It's a cartoon world, man. It's really all over the top. People are saying, "Oh, well, obviously toxic masculinity is bad stuff." And it's like, yeah, obviously toxic masculinity is bad stuff. We know it's bad stuff. Why is this happening? What's going on? What the fuck is this? This is insane.

I thought it was more effective to just portray it and really get to the roots of it and try and see, "How is this funny?" But at the same time, you can be sympathetic with these characters. You can feel sorry for them and, at the same time, repulsed by them. I just thought it was good to just lay it out.

It's been a while since I've heard an album in the indie sphere talk about sex like this, too. Why do you think that is?
Well, in indie music now—in critically acclaimed music—the main metric for whether something's good or whatever is subtlety. People are really obsessed with being subtle—being overly subtle. There's often nothing said in the song, and the chord changes are super middle-of-the-road—which is cool, but with something like sex, it's so easy to say it badly. It can come across awkward, or silly, or the wrong sort of thing, so people are scared to even have a go, you know? People are proper. You may as well try, and if you fail, it's still worth it if it's something unique. But it seems to be the case that people are... I don't know, it's just a weird point in music.

Let's talk more about your adolescence. What were you absorbing, what were you pushing back against?
London is a lot of going out and stuff—going to raves and all that kind of thing. I was never really into that. I was much more into just listening to music—noise music, funny jazz albums. I never really had the experience of going crazy, going wild, doing drugs and everything. So by the time I was going out when we were doing music, it was from a different point of view. I was seeing everyone in these situations and crazy rabbit holes as they slowly go along, bit by bit—drinking cans of beer in the park, house parties, going out to clubs, and then going crazy. It's step by step. I went straight to going out to clubs, and it had more of a stark impact.

Tell me more about early showgoing for you.
I went to see amazing shows. I saw Boredoms when they played in London when I was 14. They played with 88 guys playing cymbals. It was fucking awesome. I saw Swans, that lineup they had for about 10 years—I saw them six or seven times. I saw Death Grips—they're an important band, everyone loved that—and loads of classical stuff. When I was 12 or so, I'd just go every week. Because, you know, why not? When you're a kid, that stuff is free, so you may as well get it.

I've read other interviews about how you engaged with music and tried your hand at different types of playing as you went through adolescence. It sounded almost like a training regimen to me.
I always wanted to know the best things—to know everything. I had this kind of mentality of, "What's the best record?" You have to know all of them, you have to be at a level where you can converse with anyone about that music and effectively say that you're into it. I've never been a huge fan—that thing where some people are into an artist and they know every gig, every album. Artists I like, I know all the good albums.

Did you ever consider writing about music? Because that sounds very much like the approach a music writer would take as well. Personally, I definitely empathize with the notion of not wanting to be a "fan" of one specific artist or group.
Yeah, I don't understand the whole thing of just being a crazy fan. I mean, I kind of get it, but it's not really my thing. In terms of writing about music, I tried it when I was in school because I was into writing, and I used to do album reviews and stuff. But my favorite thing about music is how unexplainably good it is. Movies, books, whatever—they all have a real-world thing to attach them to pictures and paintings. You see a beautiful painting of, I don't know, a castle, and you can say, "I like that, because I've seen a castle in real life." Whereas, what makes a certain interval in music good? I don't know. It sounds really good. The best music is, like, straight away you like it maybe—or, you have to get into it, but there's a reason why you want to listen to it. But you can't necessarily attach that to anything in the real world. Even the lyrics, that's another thing. It's different to the music, right?

Music is a really weird thing. It's the most accessible art form, and the most mysterious. It's an alien thing, so writing about it, it just feels like at every stage it's a mystery.

That's extremely interesting to observe. I've been writing music for almost 20 years now, and sometimes I'm like, "I feel like I've said all I need to say." The music's good, because I like it, and it sounds really cool. Sometimes, words fail you—and that phrase can be seen as a negative, but what would be better than something literally taking your breath away?
Exactly. Another phrase is when people say something's "toe-curlingly bad." Well, something's curling your toes, so it must be doing something right. That's the thing—all the best music, all my favorite music, is where you get physical points. You know what you're feeling.

Let's go back to movies. What are a few recently released ones you've enjoyed lately?
I saw Poor Things, and I saw—what was the Holocaust one?

The Zone of Interest.
Yeah, that was good. I find with movies now, there's a weird thing going on where—I was saying this to one of my friends—loads of great movies come out every year. Oscars movies are especially brilliant, objectively great. But I can't think of the last time I saw a movie—a new movie—where someone would tell me, "Oh, that's my favorite film of all time." Movies coming out have good acting, characters, motivation, they're subjectively well put together—but, I don't know, it's not quite the same thing of having a really good feel, a good mojo, where it's your favorite film and you just love it.

Going back to the record, I want to talk more about the lyrics, because this is a very lyrically dense record—even more so than anything you were doing in black midi.
I really hate this notion that people sometimes people have of saying, "This doesn't quite work in the song—let's take that out and make another song out of that." With every song, you should try and put as much as possible in. Even if it's still a simple song, you shouldn't leave anything on the table for next time. Why not just go for it? Every song should have a climax. I don't really like music where—it's good to be understated and stuff, but even a simple Joni Mitchell song has a climax, a bit where it's like, "Oh, right, they really went for it." That's where I was coming from. I didn't want to do any track half-assed.

I want to go back to how you entertained yourself as a kid by opening and closing the door for 30 minutes at a time. One thing I really like about this record is these moments of intense repetition. You mentioned Boredoms earlier, who did that quite a bit to great effect. Talk to me about wielding repetition like that in your music.
Repetition is a funny thing, because it's cornerstone of so much music. It's basically based around repeating something until it sounds different in different dimensions—really hypnotic. But I've always been wary of how some minimalist music that just repeats over and over again. You start to think, "Well, they could be saying anything." It's a tough balance to strike, but the best thing is when you can employ the whole repetition thing and have it change into something that's legit and has a proper arc to it—something that's really melodic or rhythmically interesting. Wherever there was repetition, it was for a reason—not just as a piece of gear.

Let's talk about the reaction you've received from the public over the years, both as a member of black midi and with this new solo material.
What was actually quite good, is that early on in black midi, the reaction was almost always negative.

How so?
Just like, "What is this? This is a load of nonsense!" People would be into it, people would get it, but even the people that were into it, it would be backhanded compliments. "Oh, this is great—if only they were all playing the same song at one point." "It's crazy stuff, I love it, it's nuts, but they don't know what they're doing." "The drummer's really good, he needs to find a good band." Stuff like that. You'll suffer with stuff like that. Early on, it became a thing of continuing what we were doing, and when it became more positive, everyone pretended they liked it all along. Either way, what can you do? The other thing they'd say is "There's no melody, there's no rhythm at all, they're just doing random stuff." It would be quite hard to do random stuff and all play at the same time! It's a bit bizarre.

What other misconceptions do you feel like you've faced as an artist?
Well, the thing that would happen a lot with black midi is that people would think that we took ourselves really seriously. I think we took the music very seriously, but it was just good fun a lot of the time. They'd say, "Oh it's humorless, it's got nothing to it, it's just all very music school." Which, sure, fair enough if that's how it comes across, but that was never intentional. With this record, though, the humor is a lot more upfront. It'd be harder for people to misconstrue that.

Let's talk more about funny music. I think it's extremely hard to be funny in music. Ween are an example of a band that's been known for being "funny" in a different way. Have you ever been into them?
I only listened to them for the first time a few years ago. And they're good, but I feel like there's a weird thing where there's music that people that are into indie music or on this underground music thing have decided they don't like before they've listened to it. There's loads of music like that. There's loads of stuff that's not trendy. And then there's loads of bands like Ween, who I think they're alright, they're pretty good, but they basically sound quite similar to a lot of these bands that you're not allowed to like. And then people get into Ween, and they're like, "Oh man, this is amazing, this is brilliant. And I'm like, "Yeah, this is good, but this sounds really similar to stuff that goes fundamentally against what you're into." So, you might as well just listen to that, you know? People will be like, "Listen to this like Italian soundtrack of this horror film," all that Goblin stuff, or this obscure Moroccan thing or something, And I'm like, "It sounds a bit like Brand X. It sounds more like Weather Report. Why not just listen to something like that?"

What's some funny music that you do like?
There's stuff like Randy Newman, who's a master songwriter. He did these songs which were satirical and very well-done, but I guess they're funny in more of a way where it's like, "Ha ha ha, it's a crazy world." I like Frank Zappa, but the humor is never the thing that I like about Frank Zappa. I like the music and the attention to detail. He did 60 albums in 30 years, there's something to that, his uncompromisingness. But the humor part is always the thing that people don't like about him, really. That's the roots of it, and I can't say that they're wrong.

Around the time black midi emerged, there was a lot of talk about the Speedy Wunderground scene in general. How did you kind of feel about being placed within that?
It seemed a bit forced. That's the vibe of these things. People really like being a fan of something and having that thing be interconnected. I mean, it's cool, but it's not really about music. I think a lot of people that are fans of bands are more fans of the bands than fans of the music. It's like the KISS Army. Because KISS is probably one of the shittest bands ever, with the biggest fan base—because they understood how to make that work. In a way, they're really geniuses, because they really focused in on this thing of, "The fans are the fans of the bands, so let's take everything we can from them, because they love it." That's fair enough, but it's quite different than being a fan of music.

You have a particularly passionate fan base at this point. Speaking to you, you don't seem too interested in actively building it, but you've cultivated it regardless. How do you feel about that?
It's great. It's a real turn-off when people complain about their audience. It's someone that's coming to your show of their own volition, paying money—that's always that's what you want. People complaining about their fan base—"I wish my fan base was more like this, more like that"—you're playing music in the first place! Get over yourself. It's not like you can control everything.

Have you had any bad fan interactions?
Yeah, there's this weird thing going on with the internet where the fans have quite high expectations of your tolerance. It's that fucking Neil Peart quote, where he says, "I can't pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend." That's maybe unsympathetic, but to an extent it's true. Someone comes up to you in the middle of finishing a show, and you're tired or want to go home, you're a million miles away from anyone, and you're talking and talking, and you say, "Okay, I'm going to go now," and then it's like, "Oh, what an asshole." It's so weird.

Have you been aware of what's going on with Chappell Roan's fanbase at this point?
No. She's, like, the big new star at this point, no? Came out of nowhere. Her and Sab Car [Sabrina Carpenter].

Yeah. It's interesting, because you look at somebody like Taylor Swift, who's been around for 15 years and has built this fervent following steadily. Then you see someone like Chappell, who's been big for a year, year and a half tops, and her fans are, I hate to say it, just as insane—intense, just blood running from their mouths. It's fascinating to me, and it scares me a little. I don't think I've ever loved anything that much in my life.
That's the thing I don't get—being a fan to this extent of wanting to know where someone lives.

It blocks out your enjoyment of other things, too. It makes me worry that we're entering this culturally incurious era. I mean, we kind of already are there.
If you were only allowed to listen to one band, music would suck. Music would be shit. No matter how good that band was, it would literally only be about how it compares to other things and how they compare to that.

black midi took off right before COVID hit, really. What was it like to have everything be put on pause at that specific time?
Oh, it was great. I mean, obviously, it was a very uncertain time, and also like, "Well, what's going on here?" But the opportunity to really re-evaluate why I'm doing music in the first place, what it's all about—because it was already getting to this point of, "This is not quite what I want." So I just really practiced guitar for ages and really sat down and listened to music and said, "What's good about this song? Why do I like that song?" I tried to work that all out, because up to that point I knew I could play, but I didn't really know theory that well. I didn't have the ability to name all the chords in a song by number and shit. So I started really getting into that, and now I'm an authentic musician basically. When I wrote all the songs after that, it was like, "Oh, yeah, this is different now. This is cool."

What's your practice regimen in general?
I don't practice enough. Maybe every two or three days, I sit down and play guitar for two or three hours and just put music on and try and play along to it, or work on new songs. During the coronavirus, I was doing it every day, and that was when I improved the most. It was great, coming up with music and always trying things, but these days it's a bit less.

It doesn't sound like you really had a moment during lockdown where you questioned the future of your career, which I know a lot of other musicians did.
I mean, I had that before, when the band was doing all right. At that point, I was thinking of becoming a train driver on the London Underground. It's a really good-paying job. You have to train and stuff, but then once you get into it, it's a tenure vibe. The union is so strong, so you're just in it forever, and it's kind of fun—you just chill on the train. I thought, "Why not?" Chekhov was a train driver, I think.

I'm curious to hear you talk about all the locations you recorded from while making this record. It's a really far-flung record sonically, and that further comes across when just looking at the list of people on the record and the places you kind of went to record.
Me and [prdocuer Seth "Shank" Evans] had plans to do a big session in London with session musicians and do it like "Billie Jean"—all playing at the same time, doing it as slick as possible. That was for "Holy Holy." Then we were looking for guys that had experience playing Latin music, because a lot of the influences on the album are Fania Records stuff and Milton Nascimento. black midi were going on tour in Brazil, so I called up the only guy I know in Brazil, who runs the record label Balaclava Records. I said, "Do you know any musicians?" He said, "Yeah, don't worry man, I've got it sorted."

He called all the musicians, booked the studio, did everything. It was great, it was amazing, it was a really easy experience. I sent them songs ahead of time and gave them chord charts, but I got there and they didn't need it. They said, "We've done it all by ear already, it's gonna be great." And it was epic. It was the first time I'd done music where I had the idea for the song in my head, and then I went to record it, and it sounded better. Usually, you lose something—the demo was better, you know had more feel. With this one, it was like, "This is what I want."

Tell me about ending the record with a cover of "If You Are But a Dream."
That's an amazing tune. It's an old tune that Frank Sinatra did in the '40s. When I first heard it, I was like, "Why is this song not more famous?" It's a brilliant tune, really unusual. It's based on this Anton Rubenstein thing from the early 20th century. I've been really interested in this thing of good lyrics—not when the lyrics are, like, the best lyrics of all time, but when the music, the lyrics, and the melody all come together and synthesize a weird new feeling. With that song, it's about this kind of yearning and romance—something that will never happen, a dream. And if you are but a dream, I guess I'll never wake up from that dream sort of thing, you know? You feel that in the melody. If you just read that lyric on a paper, it's alright—but the melody has this yearning quality to it, and the instrumentation really comes together. I wanted to do a version of that with a Salvation Army brass band vibe, like Tom Waits or something.

Let's talk more about the performative aspect of your solo work, the "Holy Holy" video especially, which is engaging to look at.
With a song like that, the temptation was to do what everyone does these days with videos: "Let's try and make it like a story—like a mini movie." Those videos are cool and stuff, but they're kinda shit, because you never remember them. It's like a shit movie you make for $10,000, and it sucks. It doesn't give you heart, it looks cheap. it doesn't actually reflect the song, it doesn't give you anything you didn't already know. The videos people actually like are just something really simple that's kind of cool. Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" isn't the best song of all time, but that's a great video because it's simple, it's a good idea, and it fits the song.

What are some other music videos you've liked over the years?
I like the video for Joe Jackson's "Stepping Out." It's just about chilling in the city—you don't have to put a whole story or anything, it's just brilliant.

What's the financial resources like in terms of your art right now?
It's pretty good. I got a one-album deal with Rough Trade, and that was after I'd already done most of the recording. The album was basically finished, but then the producer had to pay a mixing engineer, so I went to Rough Trade and it was great. They said, "Alright, the album's already done, so that's it." There was no "It needs a single" or anything. It's never been like that with them anyway.

Going back to the video, you're putting yourself front and center when it comes to the showman vibe of it all.
That stuff is risky, especially when you're doing a song which hinges on the basis that it's not me—it's a character, right? But it's released under my name, and I'm in the music video singing the whole time. It's my voice. That's a scary thing, in a way, and it's risky. But I just thought that, if it lands, it makes the joke about a million times better—to be at the forefront, to really be selling this. We weren't really doing that in black midi, and that's one of the ways that the bnad was losing a bit of immediacy. If you really believe in it, you should just go for it.

How do you feel like you've changed in the last six years? You were 17 or 18 when the band really started out, and now you're 25.
I just feel way more confident, to be honest. This album, it wasn't that tricky to actually do the nuts and bolts of it—the tricky part was, before even recording, saying "We're going to record this song that's kind of ridiculous." That would've been impossible in a band—everyone just second-guessing everything all the time. You have to have a real "Let's just go for it, sink or swim." I think it's paid off, but who knows? Maybe it hasn't. That feeling is really nice, though.

I've been saying to people a lot, when they ask, "What do you like about working on your own?" The thing that I really like is this idea that, if the album is shit, if it fails, if it's terrible, if it's a piece of crap, then it's all my fault. That's really a good feeling, because it means that there's no expectation and no one to blame. Oftentimes, you're doing something collaboratively, and it's always like, "This would've been great if he didn't do this, or if I did this." I went through and did this, and it's all on me, which is kind of freeing, in a way. It takes the pressure off.

You have a lot of people playing on the record, too. Tell me about what you look for in terms of collaborators at this point.
I've really been liking guys that can play as proper musicians. They play one chord, and you can hear that they're proper. You can hear it in one note. I found that, when I was making this, if you get a proper musician to play one chord sequence, that sounds way better immediately. That's how I want it to sound. Some musicians are looking for guys that have a good spontaneity but don't take themselves too seriously—just playing the songs, playing the music.

I want to work with as many different musicians as possible and do albums all over the place. The Brazil thing was a really amazing moment, because it opened the doors of so many things that seemed scary and seemed like they weren't gonna work. It was impromptu and uncertain as it gets, and it turned out great. So why not record an album in Japan? Why not try and record an album in America with guys I just met on that day?

Have you already started writing your next record?
Yeah, I've got enough for another one. I'm going to try and record at the end of this year. This album was done over like nine months, it was quite a long time going. So I want to try and do an album in, like, two days—ECM-style. Record one day, mix the next day, and that's it. That would be great.

Morgan from black midi plays on this record. Tell me about having him in the mix.
Morgan's an amazing musician. He's a great drummer. But part of the reason why I think he sounds so good on this album is that the other drummers have a completely different style and are quite disciplined—just playing the groove. Before we did this whole Brazil thing, we just did a session in London with me, Shank, and Morgan, which is a trio. That was cool, but it wasn't the same feeling of this brand new thing, because we'd played a load of times before and stuff.

When you say "brand new thing," I think of the album title, which also feels very Steely Dan-y to me.
It's kind of a mission statement, right? I'm not saying nothing's been done like this before—but you have to have that in your mind that this is a new thing for me. I also like the having-a-laugh-ness of saying it's a "new sound." It's, like, 1950s-style.

Walk me through the timeline of the record being written and recorded, start to finish.
I had all these songs from about the beginning of last year. The first session we did was in September, and after that we did one more in November with another drummer, this Russian guy—a random dude, a great player, he's called Andre. Then there was the Brazilian thing that changed the game a bit. So we came back to London and did some overdubs just on our own, but then booked another session with a whole another bunch of session musicians and then got to play on all the rest of it and got horns in and stuff. Even though it was over about nine months, we probably did about eight or nine days total, so it was little chunks here and there rather than like a huge prolonged thing.

How did that piecemeal approach feel to you?
I mean, it was cool. I did have issues with it. The annoying thing was that, by the time we got to mixing it, it was like trying to remember all the stuff again. That's why I'm doing it in this more simple way next time where you mix it before you have time to think about it too much or get sick of it. Luckily, that didn't happen—we never got fucking bored of it, which is a first. When you have songs in sketch form, it's about how to best make it effective—little things, like, "Let's take out and put in random things," or moving lines around. But the actual demos that I presented to the musicians sound pretty much identical to the songs on the album, and musically they were done really quickly and didn't really change.

The press around black midi's permanent hiatus has been a bit confusing. What was the timeline of how things worked out there?
It was not a good vibe for years. It wasn't going that well. We did Hellfire, and it was cool, I liked it, it was very good, but it was the first time where it was a bit like, "Ah, these songs could have turned out better." There's a big gulf between the songs and the execution. We went and did a live tour, and it was great, but the shows ended up being all the same, as well as the weird fan thing I mentioned. There were a few points where I was a bit confused—like, what's the actual mission here? What's the actual intent? It just became increasingly obvious that it wasn't gonna work for forever.

At some point, probably around the beginning of last year, the intention was to do shows that year as the last shows, and maybe do another album. But that wasn't really that realistic of an expectation.

Did you feel like there was pressure from people around you to do another record?
Oh, sure. I mean, there still is now, probably.

I thought it was interesting how things unfolded in the press, with the band's management statement saying, "We're leaving the door open." Ehh...[Makes uncertain face]

Whenever you see conflicting statements, as the reader, you kind of wonder, what's the real story here?
I don't know. It's all a bit weird.

I mean, it seems like if Morgan was on this record, the personal relationships are still...
Yes.

How are the personal relationships?
It's nothing personal. It's literally just finding the band not as fulfilling as it should be. You know, I hate this thing that people say to me: "Well, to be honest, it is a job at the end of the day." Fuck that. Like, I get it, but if you're going to do it as a job, then do anything else, but don't do music, because music as a job sucks. Most jobs that are shit, but people get to go home every night, or at least have some kind of stability—whereas you hate being a touring musician. Nine months of the year, sleeping in random places. I mean, it's cool exploring the world and stuff, but it's music, and I like music so much. It's my favorite thing. So to do that as something that you're not into, that you don't enjoy, it's making a mockery of it. It just feels disrespectful, it's a weird thing.

I saw a funny joke somebody made online about how, if black midi wanted to do a real prog band breakup, one guy would split up and tour as "The Real black midi" for 25 years.
That's exactly what would happen. Part of the surprise people had from the announcement was that it doesn't seem like anybody really breaks up anymore. I think that's stupid. All the best bands broke up, right? Velvet Underground, the original King Crimson lineup. You know you gotta know when to call it at some point. The lamest thing is putting out albums that just get progressively deader. and progressively more pointless. I like the Rolling Stones as much as anyone, but what's the point of those albums? They literally don't need to exist.

So do you see black midi as done for good, or are you actually leaving the door open?
Who knows. I don't want to have to do it all the way along. I want to do something I'm genuinely really pleased with. The thing about music—and this is a really corny phrase, but it's true—is that you don't even choose to do music. You have to do it. You don't have a choice. Any shit music, or any music that I don't like, it boils down to the band just doing it because they think, "Oh well, I guess we do this album now." There's no urgency.