Geordie Greep
Tragic Fantasies
Words by Jasper Willems
In his childhood, Geordie Greep wasn’t a stranger to loud places. His mom would have late night shifts at the salsa club she worked, and to have kids running around in these environments isn’t exactly the best of ideas. “My sister and I would have to be there too, but we’d stay in a back room — kind of hidden away, in some random room,” the frontman of recently defunct avant-punk outfit black midi remembers. “Anyway, we’d be in that back room and could only hear the music coming through the walls. It gave the whole thing this weird, mystical significance — like, ‘What the hell is going on out there?’ We didn’t know; we’d just catch glimpses of dancing as people came in and out.”
It didn’t sound like much fun, and Greep admits that back then, he thought salsa music was for “crazy people.”“But then, about six years ago, I listened to this album called Siembra by Willie Colón and Rubén Blades,” Greep says. “That’s when it hit me — this might actually be some of the best music ever recorded. You have to be a virtuoso to play it, especially the horns. Even writing it requires a level of musicality that’s as good as it gets. But at the same time, it’s incredibly accessible — anyone can enjoy it. From there, I got into a lot more of it and started listening all the time. It naturally found its way into the chord and rhythmic structures of my songs. It’s just part of the music now.”
In yeoman’s terms, Greep’s first solo album, The New Sound, could be described as salsa music for crazy people. The fantasies of rich and powerful persona non grata are laid out in the open, often so absurd and disturbing that it borders on the surreal. The dictator-protagonist of “Through a War” for example, thanks the woman he’s courting for giving him an STD (“You gave me nothing but an incurable disease / For which I’m so glad, you’ll always be with me”). Though undeniably funny in Greep’s over-the-top croony delivery, there’s an underlying tragedy in these caricatures: the realisation that they might not be so surreal after all. Though it was beyond Greep’s control, The New Sound lands in an era where figures like Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk use A.I.-programs grotesquely inflate their hypermasculinity. These fantasies are no longer hidden behind closed curtains, but normalised and oversaturated in the public forum.
“A hundred percent,” Greep answers. “Well, I mean, that was the inspiration for a lot of this stuff, man — like Andrew Tate and all that. It’s not even just those guys specifically; it’s the fact that people who are absolutely nuts — just crazy, reprehensible, and whatever else — are also just bizarre. It’s bizarre that these guys are real, existing on the internet, and reaching an audience of millions. That’s crazy. And it’s not just millions — it’s younger and younger people. I mean, it’s built around appealing to kids, so it makes sense. But because it’s social media, it’s not like a TV show that airs once a week. It’s constant — posting every day. You have to wonder how much of it is just a character they’ve created and how they manage to keep it up. It’s just insane.”
Greep realizes he’s walking a slippery slope with these ribald character studies, as they might be interpreted as heroic in some circles. “With the music and the delivery of the lyrics, we’re playing out the characters’ fantasies. It’s like how they imagine themselves coming across — a sort of rose-tinted mirror version of reality, you know? There’s a thread through all the songs where, as much as you can point and laugh, you also might think, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been there — not in that exact situation, but not a million miles away either.” The fallacy of the Greep-protagonists are implicit in the musical contrasts: the smooth-as-silk, flirtatious salsa and samba instrumentation — recorded in Brazil with session players — uncomfortably rubs elbows with the cerebral jazz-fusion/deconstructionist noise rock whims was known for. And that, according to Greep, is precisely part of the point.
“That’s one of the main ideas behind the whole album. I thought the humor, dark comedy, tragedy — whatever you want to call it — would all work better if we played it straight. Definitely, with the music, we kept it straight. But a lot of the time in the performance, yeah, it’s over-the-top and manic, going crazy. Still, when the character is in the depths of despair, why not sing it like that? What’s there to lose? You don’t always have to be winking at the audience. Playing it completely straight actually makes the joke better.”
