Hellfire

A searing, surreal descent into chaos, Hellfire is the sound of Black Midi at full detonation—frantic, theatrical, and entirely their own. Written in pandemic isolation and recorded in just thirteen days, the band’s third (and, for now, final) album is their most feverishly cinematic yet: a gonzo cabaret of violence, vice, and scorched moral terrain, told through snarling first-person monologues and warped genre pastiche.

If Cavalcade was a drama, Hellfire is, as Geordie Greep put it, “an epic action film”—all scream-close intensity and wild-eyed propulsion. The band lean deeper into their inner vaudevillians, blending jazz fusion, progressive rock, flamenco, country, and showtunes with the giddy precision of musicians who seem both deadly serious and totally unhinged. Greep’s vocals oscillate between preacher, pimp, and deranged narrator, steering us through sordid tales of boxing matches, murder, and military indoctrination.

Songs like “Welcome to Hell” and “Sugar/Tzu” don’t just change tempo—they ricochet between dimensions. Horns blare, rhythms convulse, and entire subplots unfold in a single verse. And yet, nothing feels arbitrary. The album’s structure is razor-sharp, its transitions deliberate. As the band noted, a planned tracklist shaped the album’s architecture—its jarring shifts made purposeful, its chaos carefully choreographed.

There’s a sense that Black Midi are pulling apart rock’s lineage and sewing it back together with jagged stitches: Mr. Bungle, Brechtian theatre, Frank Zappa, and Charles Mingus all crash into view. But Hellfire isn’t just genre play—it’s a volatile, occasionally grotesque mirror of human folly. It ends not with catharsis, but exhaustion. Which makes the band’s 2024 hiatus feel oddly poetic: after Hellfire, where else was there left to go but silence?

A hell of a record. And maybe the only one quite like it.