After black midi: where the loudest band of their generation actually went

black midi confirmed an "indefinite hiatus" in August 2024, and Geordie Greep admitted later that the band had really come apart well before anyone said so out loud. For a group that spent five years as the most-hyped young British band of their kind, the ending was oddly quiet. No farewell tour. No reunion bait. Three musicians walked off in different directions, and almost at once started making more focused music than the band had managed in a while.

Nobody saw that coming. The breakup improved all three of them.

The band that was too much

black midi met at the BRIT School and came up through the Windmill in Brixton, the sweaty South London pub that incubated half the interesting British guitar music of the last decade (we mapped the whole scene in the Windmill guide). Their 2019 debut announced a band with far more ideas than restraint.

Schlagenheim was thrilling and exhausting in equal measure: math-rock spasms, Greep's deranged crooner-yelp, a rhythm section that treated 4/4 as a personal insult. It earned them a Mercury Prize nomination and a reputation as the most technically absurd young band in the country.

Cavalcade (2021) and Hellfire (2022) pushed the chaos toward deranged showtunes and prog opera. By Hellfire the songs were dense to the point of suffocation, every bar crammed with information. It was dazzling. It was also the sound of a band running out of room to grow inside its own format.

So they stopped.

Geordie Greep, lounge lizard

Greep moved first and farthest.

The New Sound (Rough Trade, October 2024) proved the frontman's theatrical menace was never a band gimmick. Recorded between London and São Paulo with black midi touring keyboardist Seth Evans producing, it trades math-rock for slick Latin jazz, Steely Dan session-musician gloss and lurid storytelling. Greep sings as a parade of creeps, braggarts and lonely men in hotel bars, and the band behind him is so tight it's almost rude. It's funnier, filthier and more controlled than anything black midi put out. Morgan Simpson plays on several tracks, which makes it half a reunion already.

Cameron Picton, the quiet one

If Greep got louder, Picton went the other way.

He formed a new group, My New Band Believe, and their self-titled debut landed on Rough Trade in April 2026 with a cast that includes Kiran Leonard and the free-improv veterans Steve Noble and Andrew Cheetham. The record is built mostly from acoustic instruments, full of sudden shifts in mood and tempo, leaning on British folk and modern classical more than brute force. The Guardian's four-star review called it "less distant, less inclined to showboating, easier to love" than his old band's work. That's the point. Picton was always black midi's secret melodist, the one writing the songs you could actually hum, and on his own he finally has room for them.

(It isn't in the Riffiter catalogue yet, so there's no rate card to click here. Go find it.)

Morgan Simpson, the secret weapon

Drummers get written out of these stories. They shouldn't, and Simpson least of all. He's been a serious player since he was a kid, and with black midi parked he's turned into one of the most in-demand musicians in British music.

The clearest sign of where his head is at is the company he keeps. He's been working with Nala Sinephro, the Belgian harpist and synth player whose ambient jazz sits about as far from black midi's racket as music gets. Endlessness (2024) is the Sinephro record to start with: patient, weightless, built on slow harmonic drift. Playing in that world means listening more than hitting. The kid who could play anything fast turned out to be just as good at playing almost nothing. He's been turning up with Little Simz too, another artist who needs a drummer with that kind of ear.

So was the breakup a loss?

A little. Nothing else sounded like black midi at full tilt, and probably nothing will. But the hiatus did what most breakups don't: it let three musicians who'd spent their twenties crammed into one overstuffed sound each find a register of their own. Greep got theatrical, Picton got tender, Simpson got subtle. None of those records exists if the band keeps grinding.

For the scene that made them, start with the Windmill guide. Then rate the records above and tell us which black midi member made the best escape. I've got a pick. The comments are where you talk me out of it.