In the waning days of this summer, Geordie Greep unceremoniously announced the end of his feverishly beloved band Black Midi. After initial confusion and suspicion that the trio might just be trolling us, the split was confirmed. Soon after, Greep officially announced his solo debut album. As if to underline the finality of it all, it was boldly titled The New Sound.

Across three albums, Black Midi had already proven themselves particularly restless and unpredictable musical adventurers. Greep’s material, in particular, sharply abandoned any association with the “post-punk” scene that originally begat the band, flitting through an array of old-time-y musical traditions while warping them to fit in Black Midi’s own gonzo world.

On The New Sound, some will hear the former Black Midi member untethered — frenetic, dense arrangements, Latin-tinged prog opuses, precious few concessions to the fans still sticking around hoping for another “953” mosh pit. Initially, The New Sound can feel like the most challenging and baffling work from Greep yet. But soon, it reveals itself to be something different. Free to pursue his ideas entirely on his own terms, all of Greep’s idiosyncrasies start to make more sense together. It’s a vastly ambitious and accomplished album from a musical standpoint, and Greep matches that with a new sense of focus on vocal performance as well as lyrical acuity. These are strange, epic songs, magnifying the confessions of sad, drunk men in late night scenes so that they feel poignant and mythological even when lurid.

The New Sound begins to feel like Greep throwing down the gauntlet. It’s an impressive reintroduction. Ahead of its release, Greep and I caught up via Zoom. As usual, he proved a candid, thoughtful interviewee, his thoughts only serving to further clarify the bizarre but gripping vision he’s presented on The New Sound.

Below, hear new single “Blues” and read excerpts from our conversation.

The album was announced right after this news of Black Midi’s conclusion. How far back do these songs date? Do they go back to when the band was more functional or were they gestating as “This is my way out”?

GEORDIE GREEP: In a way, both. It was something that was a mounting priority. Some of the songs date to immediately after the third Black Midi album came out. I do like being busy and trying to do as much as possible. I want to keep doing an album every year. I missed one last year, but that’s alright, we’ll come back.

As time went on, it became clear to me as you get older you get more honest with yourself about what you want rather than trying to please everyone. I thought, you know what, I think this is the best thing for me, my life, the future. Not just next year, but the next 20. I was trying to set up, as best as possible, what I wanted to do ultimately. And ultimately, doing the band was good, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. I wanted a particular kind of musical experience. In the back of my mind, it was always: “Let’s get this album going.”

After Hellfire, was there a fourth Black Midi album coming together, and you were feeling pulled in this direction instead?

GREEP: The songs we were working on together weren’t coming together in a way that was that satisfying. These songs I had, I felt like they wouldn’t necessarily lend themselves to being played by the band, both in terms of the instrumentation and… take a song like “Holy, Holy,” right? It’s going to be a hard task to convince anyone else it’s a good idea. Even to convince myself it was a good idea, I had to really psych myself up. “It’ll be OK, people will like it.” Now it’s come out and done well, which is cool. But it was like, “Oh, man, if this comes off wrong, it’s bad news.” In working with the band, there would’ve been a compromise, and it would’ve ended up with the song weaker. Everyone always says, “Oh I know what to do,” and it’s often not true. But if there’s any case where having a one-track vision and an uncompromising approach, I think it definitely paid off in that song.

It seems like that song could be divisive in the sense that some people would be like, “This extends logically from some elements of Black Midi, and I’m excited to see where he’s going,” while others might be like, “Oh wow, it’s all the weirdest parts of Black Midi run amok.” I actually feel like everything on this new record is very fluid, as opposed to some of the hard aggressive jumps in Black Midi’s last two records. Having talked to you before, I know you guys sometimes had a bit of glee in confounding people’s expectations. Were you expecting people to embrace that or react a certain kind of way?

GREEP: I’ve heard it 300 times, and I still like it, but it’s hard to see the forest for the trees at that point. You have to be careful with that subject matter, and there’s musically a lot going on. It could easily go into at best muzak and at worst a piece of crap. There’s always this thing of, “Maybe I’m totally wrong.” Maybe I’ve heard it too much, lost touch, gone mental. That’s the psyching up part. I was into it, I liked it.

In terms of the expectations from previous Black Midi stuff… it’s kind of cool either way. Whether people say, “He’s totally gone nuts,” or… with this album, it feels more consistent in my head. It’s going down crazy avenues and doing all this silly stuff, but there’s a lot more grooves. There’s a lot more, “This song is this song and it’s five minutes.” That whole jumping around thing we did [in Black Midi] was a perfectly fine musical technique. But I think in the way we were doing it was maybe emblematic of a youthful insecurity. “We can do a ballad, but let’s put this crazy sound effect on it.” There always had to be a caveat or a slightly ironic thing. Not necessarily consciously, but from my point of view I can see that was my approach sometimes.

The main thing [with The New Sound] was one idea per song. It was a lot more structured. What it boils down to is getting to “I believe in this song, so I’m not going to overcomplicate it.” I don’t have to put all those things to make it “more interesting” in case someone gets bored.

In other conversations, I’d sometimes get the sense you guys would dismiss the first record in favor of what came after. A sort of “Now we’re really getting to what we want to do.” Sometimes people just look back and say this project succeeded or failed here. Do you still like the work you did with Black Midi or do you feel completely disconnected from it now?

GREEP: I think those albums are great, to be honest. I’m happy with them. They came together well. Looking back on the last 10 years of music, they do have their own thing going on compared to a lot of other music — whether you like them or not, or whether I like them or not. Especially given our age and being in a band with lots of big personalities, the fact that we did three albums that are even OK is an achievement. The fact that they’re quite good is great.

I’ve grown to accept that every album I do I’ll probably say, “This is the first real one, this is actually what I’m listening to.” But that’s the right attitude to have. Why did you make something you like as much as the last thing? I think it’s a good sign if you think it’s way better and it’s all over-the-top hyperbole.

Tell me about your experience with the sessions in Brazil, getting together with musicians who weren’t really familiar with your work.

GREEP: It was the best day I can remember, musically. It was the best feeling. Leading up to it I was slightly worried. It all ties into this confidence thing. The main song we were going in for was “Holy, Holy.” We were going to do it in London, but then I thought, “Why don’t we record it in Brazil, it’s based on a lot of that music, I know this one guy there.” He calls up some musicians — not necessarily last-minute, but it’s very uncertain. Once you commit to booking musicians and a studio you can’t unpay that money. This has got to work, and it’s weird things I haven’t done before. We’re playing this song where even if everything goes to plan, it could be shit. It’s taking a lot of risks.

So, we got there and we set up and I met the guys. They liked the demos. I gave them chord charts and they were like, “No, we don’t need it.” Once we started playing it was straight away. It was exactly as I wanted it to sound. Even just the bass and drums, it was brilliant, perfect. It was the first time it got better and better exponentially from the idea to the demo to the recording. A lot of times the recording might be better but you feel as if you lost something from the demo. It was less overwrought or conscious. This, once we were playing with the musicians, it was incredible. We did three more songs with those guys and each one only took about an hour. Played it, did two more takes, and that was it.

I was curious about the tone behind the name The New Sound, whether it was a winky old-time-y thing like “Geordie Green Presents: His New Sound!” or whether, for you, it’s chasing a new sound you haven’t heard before.

GREEP: It’s both of those things. I love that old-time-y vibe of The Swingin’ Sound Of Gene Krupa or whatever it is. But it’s also this mantra. I’m like Jeff Goldblum: If it’s on the album, I can’t forget my mantra. I also think it’s good to set the bar high with the first album. You’ve said that now, you’ve got to deliver on that. I knew it was going to be called that from the beginning, even before we started recording.

You’ve described this material as being “bizarre, horrible love songs.” You collected a lot of it from going out to clubs hearing stories from drunk men.

GREEP: It’s not by design, it just happens over time. I had some interesting adventures, and then you think, “These can be songs.” For the first couple albums I was sitting down and trying to write poetic lines. That’s great, there’s nothing wrong if you can sit down and get something good. But oftentimes, I’d be on a night out doing whatever, and I would think things or someone would say something and I’d think, “That’s a lyric.” It was more of an oral process than before. This was collecting catchphrases or funny one-liners, and seeing how they tied together in songs.

There were times when we were doing these and I thought, “Do I need to change it up and have more diversity?” But I really like albums where they’re about one thing, so why not? I think it’s fairly unique, especially for this kind of music. All I wanted was an opportunity to really sing properly, and that came from making the music as melodic as possible but then also letting the lyrics getting to the heart of this yearning, desperate thing. There’s humor, winks. But it’s desperation and it’s passion.

You’ve done some character sketch writing before but these feel like very fleshed out scenes. There’s also some grisly stuff along the way. Lots of male lizard brain kind of stuff. You’ve talked about Nabokov. What other art was inspiring you? Why did you decide these lonely men were the characters you wanted to collect?

GREEP: These days there’s a lot of this stuff reaching extremes and becoming very scary in some ways. These guys are more isolated than ever. Go on to Twitter and everything is so extreme now. Maybe that’s a Boomer thing to say. But it’s true. In the last five or 10 years there’s a lot of change in this men stuff. People like Andrew Tate. Even on “Holy, Holy,” this line about the Jihadis — I saw a video of Andrew Tate saying, “Even ISIS watches my videos, even ISIS thinks I’m cool.” Like, he was bragging. And I was like, “What the fuck.” That’s the weirdest quote I’ve ever heard. That’s just one thing, but it’s stuff like all the time. These insane guys, and it’s real to somebody.

As for Nabokov, I love the idea of exploring the depths of pervasion and putting it in a literary context and explore that in a genuine way, not just poking fun. Obviously there’s a lot of poking fun on this album, too, but at the same time I think almost every song I have tried to put something in where, by the end of the song, you feel sorry for these people. Georges Simenon, his books, I’ve been reading loads of those. Javier Marías, a great Spanish writer.

Tell me about the new track “Blues.”

GREEP: It’s one of the most impromptu in terms of the arrangement. That song was me and [former Black Midi members] Morgan [Simpson], and Shank. I had the idea, but I wanted to keep it as loose as possible. The recording is the only time we played the song in full. It’s all about the interaction between the drums and the vocal. I wanted to do something like one of my favorite singers, this French singer Léo Ferré. He has this rhetorical writing, starting with a theme and going down and down until you get to this pessimistic, nihilistic, end of the universe kind of thing.

The blues is about when you’re 18. You’re walking around pretending you’re the shit. Walking around pretending you’re in a movie, or you’re on the run with a gun. This stupid stuff that a lot of people have done at least once, but keep going down that road and getting to “The universe is going to explode!” It’s very over-the-top but satisfying imagery.

You mentioned Morgan and Shank playing, so you had some Black Midi associates outside Black Midi. You’ve mentioned that by the end you guys weren’t really on speaking terms. I remember when I first met you guys at SXSW in 2019 — you were so young. Was some of it just like, getting older and interests diverging?

GREEP: It’s high school. We met in high school. Remember the people you were friends with when you were 15, and you look around at 25 and everyone’s different? It’s not like you don’t like those people anymore, it just kind of happens. If you’re in a band, you’re going through that in the public eye. On paper, you’re obliged to stay in this situation. But everyone has this, you know?

In terms of Morgan playing on the album… I wanted to keep it as open as possible. It was circumstantial. I knew that song, “Blues,” was the real showcase for his drumming. On those Black Midi records, the music was so rigid between section to section. There wasn’t that many tunes where he could just solo basically over the rest of the group. I thought this was the perfect opportunity to get him in there and say, “This song is simple: Play off it rather than in it.”

The New Sound is out 10/4 on Rough Trade.