black midi

Since 2017 · United Kingdom

Full songs onSpotify Apple Music YouTube

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Who they shaped

Nobody on the map lists them as an influence yet.

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Hellfire (2022)

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Hellfire pushes black midi's virtuosic chaos into something closer to a concept album, staging its songs like scenes in a lurid, self-aware morality play. "Sugar/Tzu" frames a boxing match as a kind of absurdist spectacle, the band lurching between jagged riffing and sudden orchestral bombast without ever settling into a predictable shape. Geordie Greep's vocal performance throughout leans theatrical, closer to a narrator than a conventional frontman. It stands as the fullest, most controlled realization of a band whose whole appeal was refusing to stay controlled.

Sleeve notes

black midi

Hellfire · 2022

black midi formed in south London around 2017 out of the same Windmill venue scene that produced Black Country, New Road, Squid and Jockstrap, built around Geordie Greep's guitar and vocals alongside Cameron Picton and drummer Morgan Simpson. Their live sets became notorious for barely resembling the studio versions of their own songs, stretching and detonating arrangements in real time with a virtuosity that drew as much from prog and jazz as from any rock lineage.

Hellfire, their third album, arrived in 2022, built around a theatrical, often darkly comic concept that pushed the band's chaos into more structured territory than before. The group disbanded in 2024, with Greep moving on to a solo career distinct from the band's collective sound. black midi's brief run left behind a disproportionate influence on the wider Windmill scene relative to its short lifespan.

Played at

The Windmill Scene

Brixton, South London · 2016–now

On the bill

The scene's most sonically extreme act and, by reputation, its center of gravity — their controlled-chaos live sets became the thing other Windmill regulars measured their own gigs against.

The whole scene