Geordie Greep

Geordie Greep

Is The New Sound a tonic for these times? Let’s ask Geordie Greep.

“Music can be so much more than learning to play the same as everybody else. It can be anything you want. With recording The New Sound, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited, and sometimes it’s good to do something else, to let go.”

Geordie’s debut solo album delivers a high-quality, all-embracing alternative pop energy, balancing the ridiculous and the brilliant with ease.

The making of the record is remarkable: over thirty session musicians across two continents. “Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute… The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days.”

Greep’s intense, elusive style evokes Frank Zappa, Frank Sinatra, and Scott Walker. The instrumental title track is a jazz-funk piece full of brass, polyrhythms, and explosive shifts—from whispers to shouts.

The stories form vignettes of the “Active Male Imagination,” with Greep as emcee. Characters drift through wild fantasies—often failing. “The main theme of the record is desperation; someone who thinks they have everything under control, but they don’t.” Themes range from surreal (cannibalism, boiling alive, a woman giving birth to a goat) to scenes of street life—cafes, bars, rented rooms, cabarets.

Parody and sincerity blur, notably in Holy Holy, which tells of an imagined nightclub romance with indie chords and bold Latin big band arrangements.

What next?
“My plan is to ‘do a Keith Jarrett thing’, have a different group of session musicians in a different place and lean into the fact that we’re not going to get it the same.”

How could anything ever be the same with Greep at the helm?