Youth deafens and demands to be heard. It's the essence of most creative movements in history. And for Geordie Greep, it could be a kind of creed for his solo journey, with his debut The New Sound, an album that is absurd and theatrical and, at its best, strangely honest.
By the time I arrived in London, 'the scene' already had the feeling of a party long since ended: there was still music, faint and fractured, but the people who stayed danced as if they hadn't noticed the lights coming on. The twilight years of any movement carry a peculiar energy. This era of post-punk revival had become something like a rumour about itself, a story people told with too many ellipses and no clear ending. At its height, its defiant absurdities, its penchant for self-mythology, and its strange cocktail of detachment and deep yearning were earnest symptoms of a lack of identity and direction that, at its end, only revealed their attempts to dramatise their own condition sonically and occupy the city's spaces with speed and noise to be just a masquerade of purpose.
I can't blame those still replaying the moments when everything felt vital and new. There's an allure to romanticising a time defined by nothing but potential. But that sort of validation-seeking gnaws on art's Achilles with sawed teeth. As does earnest belief in its blurry promise. So where did that leave those still seeking it? The post-punk vanguard had left behind a phantom trace, a map etched into the city's skin, but the destinations were growing sparse. Still, there was something magnetic about the remnants, and the odd corners of the city where people gathered to see what might emerge next. This is the backdrop against which Geordie Greep (formerly the frontman of the now-defunct rock-experimenta group black midi) arrives, not with a map, but with a "new sound". The New Sound, to be precise—an album which isn't a statement so much as a question, a provocation, a challenge: Can you still feel something you don’t fully understand?
Greep shrugs off the importance of it all. "Just thought, what have I got to lose, really?" he says, half-grinning, before candidly leaning into the freedom this album has granted him. "I may as well just try now, while I'm still young and fresh. A lot of people do their band for 10, 15, 20 years, beyond the point where it feels like the most exciting thing to do and they've run out of juice." The album, an 11-track project, channels the energy of his former band while playing with the listener's expectation of what that means. There's a defiant absurdity to it, the kind that comes from understanding that art, like life, doesn't resolve cleanly, leaning into its contradictions, because Greep knows there's something truer in the artifice. This is the same impulse that fueled the scene's early days, the mythology of it all: dressing up as revolutionaries to mask the fact that everyone just wanted to feel something, anything, with more intensity than the everyday allowed.
In another era, Greep might have been a troubadour or a charlatan, but he is, after all, a product of his time—the kind of figure who thrives on the periphery of a cultural moment, half in on the joke and half writing it. To meet him is to confront a particular type of charisma, one that doesn't ask to be understood but dares you to keep up. He walks into a room not with a looseness that feels oddly calculated, on a path he's inventing as he goes. The way he speaks of his music, this New Sound, with a sideways glance at his own title, half-mocking the very idea of novelty while daring you to find it there anyway: Greep laughs when he says the name. "It's kitschy," he admits. "It's just bombast. Whether or not it actually is 'the new sound'—who's to say?" But therein lies its trick: the question isn't whether it's new but whether it feels new. And in a world where meaning is so often bent into the shapes we need it to take, his refusal to over-explain or to pin anything down feels radical.
Geordie Greep isn't a man who demands the spotlight; he warps it, tilts it, makes it his. He moves and talks as if he's tethered to another tempo, carrying the casual arrogance of someone who has 'seen enough' of the scene but isn't jaded—far from it, actually. His drive, more impatient than zealous, finds something distinctly restless, perhaps even crippling, that stirs at the album's core. In these songs, characters wander through fantasies and failures, each one somehow wired to anachronistic charms and grotesque impulses. Greep seems to enjoy creating characters who can't seem to find their way to anything other than their own oblivion, their voices susurrating under the weight of desperate, fragile exhalations.
"It's a balancing act," he says of this approach. "You can't be cruel. At no point is it about becoming a complete parody." His influences range from Humbert Humbert to Randy Newman's "Short People", characters swimming in a murky self-awareness that invites more empathy than it perhaps deserves. "It's very powerful when you can relate or empathise with someone you detest," he says. "That's what great satire is. Showing how bad it is without telling you". Of his choice for the album's art (an illustration by Japanese artist Toshio Saeki) he tells me, it was the perfect "crossover between beauty and perversion. Whether something is on the line of good taste or not, it's sometimes hard to say."
This brand of storytelling, to him, is more than a stylistic decision—Greep's ambitions lie not in novelty for novelty's sake but in constructing a playground for the imagination—as these songs have their own strange traditions, their own logic, a private syntax that, rather than rebelling against convention, simply ignores it. The boyish abandon of black midi might remain visible in the corners, yet Greep emerges here, unaccompanied, with a new vocabulary—the resulting work is something of an envoi, a final send-off to old ideas, as he pries open a space for whatever strange future sounds might grow from the dwindling ashes. "When you're making your own music, sometimes there is a tendency to really push into the extreme boundary," he admits. "It's like you're figuring it out while you're playing it," he explains, a kind of tabula rasa where each song asks its own questions before answering them in cascading waves of sound. Brazilian session musicians hum in the background, their rhythms pressing against London's hazy rock soundscape. The songs, then, aren't built but unearthed, rough at the edges, still hot with the friction of their creation.
"It's about coming to terms with what's going on," he says. But the terms are never fixed, the footing always slippery. In the track Motorbike, producer Seth Evans narrates the desolate inner life of a character with singular lusts. "All I want is a Yamaha motorbike to ride and ride and ride," he growls. The guitars around him wail with abandon, crashing like engines on a nihilistic joyride to nowhere. Indicative of the album as a whole, by the time the track ends, you're left not with resolution but with motion—circles within circles, a motorbike revving endlessly in the distance. And maybe that's the point. At the end of the night, when the scene fades entirely into memory, what remains is not the answer but the question, not the light but the afterglow.
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