When Geordie Greep decided to call his debut solo album The New Sound, he didn’t have the sound nailed down yet. He knew that was going to be the title before he even started recording it, when no one had any reason to believe there wouldn’t be a black midi album after Hellfire. Then, just a week before formally announcing the album – which he had already previewed live – the frontman revealed, via a series of Instagram comments, that the band was “indefinitely over.” What Greep teased as “new music, new group, new sound” while promoting one show in April immediately took on a different weight of expectation. Some fans already confounded by the black midi situation may not have been thrilled by the idea of Greep going in a totally different direction, but confusion and excitement have always been positively correlated in the band’s universe. The New Sound does leave you bewildered, which is at least partially a sign of its success. That it’s also enthralling in its own right is a huge plus.
Greep knows he isn’t reinventing the wheel here, but making “new sound” his mission statement seems to have been crucial in actually going through with it. It finds him venturing into an array of disparate styles that wouldn’t have gelled within the context of – or that he would have a hard time pitching to – the band, from Steely Dan to various strains of Latin music, without shedding its essentially iconoclastic influences. To actually nail it down, Greep recorded the LP over several sessions on two continents: in London, with former black midi members Morgan Simpson and Seth ‘Shank’ Evans, and in São Paulo, with a band of local musicians whose free-wheeling spirit and note-perfect delivery justify the record’s grandiosity. In some ways, the moments that musically define The New Sound are the grooviest and least chaotic, the tracks that coast a little on what’s new without the looming gravity of its thematic concerns: the instrumental title track, which boasts a slinky double bass solo and beautifully intertwining electric guitars panned left and right, as well as the brief but delightful ‘Bongo Season’.
The delicacy of its lyrical ideas is another reason The New Sound probably fares best as a solo album. Greep understood that anything less than an uncompromising – and, more importantly, rather focused – approach could easily drown the whole ship. “It was like, ‘Oh, man, if this comes off wrong, it’s bad news,’” he admitted of ‘Holy, Holy,’ the lead single that still stirred some controversy for its distinctly convincing portrayal of the kind of pathetic character that populates the album. One of the reasons MJ Lenderman’s fascination with similar kinds of men on the critically lauded Manning Fireworks – his song ‘Wristwatch,’ like ‘Holy, Holy,’ specifically nods to Andrew Tate – couldn’t be as divisive is that Greep favors over-the-top showmanship over subtle non-sequiturs; he’s the one observing drunk men in bars as well as the one bringing them to the stage, and the stench of male insecurity and sleaziness carries through the centuries (whereas Lenderman’s sketches are tied to the modern era). If ‘Holy, Holy’ isn’t up your alley, it’s unlikely the rest of The New Sound will be. But it does offer a fuller picture.
None of this is particularly new territory for Greep: the verbosity, theatricality, and vulgarity of The New Sound are all in line with the last couple of black midi albums in particular. But placing himself front and center (with the exception of ‘Motorbike,’ which hands the mic to Shank) allows him to flesh them into a more narratively cohesive listen. Some of the cheesy musical signifiers match the characters’ corniness without being totally subsumed by them, while the maniacal nature of the music directly flows through the characters Greep is embodying: their ludicrous flights of fancy, their overblown fears, their total disconnect from reality. Dismantling the line between the narrator and his subjects is Greep’s sense of humor: most lyricists would leave the joke at “Do you know what I mean?/ Is your favorite turn of phrase,” but Greep really makes it land by repeating the phrase over and over again, then saying it’s also “your second favorite turn of phrase.”
‘Holy, Holy’ is sleeker in presentation than other songs on the album, which means it’s harder to make that separation, but in case there was any doubt, Greep’s acerbity elsewhere cuts through any semblance of romanticism and sinks the characters to deeper lows of humiliation. Ridiculing “another lonely executive cunt” who only “knows how to pay to touch” is one thing; saying “I would’ve disemboweled myself just to hold your hand” or “With each itch of my loins, the music of your voice” is quite another. Sharp and persistent as his lyrics may be, sometimes it’s his inflection that gets the point across: “to earn you, to love you.” As much as it pokes fun at these people, what it’s ultimately meant to elicit is pity, which is a difficult feeling to engage with for an entire album. But The New Sound is bizarrely compelling in that it’s not just a collection of portraits: it tries to turn things around in the final leg, mounting its ambition, itching for sympathy. But even the greatest vulnerability Greep can muster for these characters comes up short.
Still, beyond the irreverence and debauchery of it all, something about where Greep leaves things cuts right to the bone. Something unusually poignant in the image of “the spouse happily married who still dies alone” on the 12-minute epic ‘The Magician,’ which ends with him wondering, “What’s left of the dreamer/ Who dreams and dreams and dreams/ But thinks he isn’t dreaming/ Thinks he is free?” Greep doesn’t provide any answers, of course, nor a wholly new sound. His ending with a cover of ‘If You Are But a Dream’ seems to suggest that none of this fantastical yearning is new, either. But his own reimagining is something else, and it’s enough to get swept up in.