On February 18, 2020, blackmidi performed a tour in riverside, Newcastle, attracting as many as 300 fans. Before the show even started, people crowded into the livehouse. The audience came from all ages, including old people with white hair, but mostly young people.

Black Midi (styled Black Midi) is a British rock band from London, formed in 2017. The band consists of Geordie Greep (vocals, guitar), Matt kwasniewski-kelvin (vocals, guitar),Cameron Picton (vocals, bass, synthesizer) and Morgan Simpson (drums). Their name derives from the Japanese music genre Black MIDI. Their sound is described as experimental rock, mathematical rock, noise rock, and post-punk.

“This is the first time I’ve seen blackmidi play,” said lina, one of the fans from the UK. “I got to know the band from the mercury award nominations, because I’m a rock fan myself, so I fell in love with them.”

The band started with producer Dan Carey’s label Speedy Wunderground and released their debut single “BMBMBM” in 2018. They released their debut studio album, Schlagenheim, produced and recorded by Carey, through Rough Trade on 21 June 2019. It was critically acclaimed and entered the UK top 50 albums chart and was nominated for the 2019 mercury prize.

The band has won plaudits for their brilliant performances, but these are only part of the puzzle: beyond the blitz, they are also driven by improvisation. Both gripp and Simpson learned to improvise in church bands – gripp in north London, Simpson in quiet hertfordshire, and his musician parents made him a parish drummer when he was five. At the jam session, the two men’s expertise was clearly blended: as Simpson pushed the band to its climax, sometimes in silence, sometimes in unmanageable squall, gripp leaned intently over his guitar in his tracks, barely looking up.

Over the past year, the black MIDI has gone from the eccentric of the pub circuit to the head-and-tail of the famous British rock pioneers, marked by anxious hooks and the testy lyrics that transformed London into a business class playground. The band’s rise was accompanied by a nostalgic echo of “guitar boy”, a throwback to the post-liberal math-rock generation that attracted the attention of the British media, but at least musically, the black MIDI flattened the form and recreated it from the ground up.