Under the Radar

BLACK MIDI

n the summer of 2018, when live clips started circulating of an impossibly young London quartet performing unimaginably complicated arrangements with an equally unimaginable precision, they looked more like a viral marketing deepfake than a real band. Playing with the sort of ferocious precision and audacious swagger that suggested they had either started jamming together as toddlers or had found a cheat code around the supposed 10,000 hours a band needs to fully hone their craft, guitarist/vocalist Geordie Greep, bassist/vocalist Cameron Picton, guitarist Matt KwasniewskiKelvin, and drummer Morgan Simpson were, in fact, very real teenagers. A few months later, when they appeared for a KEXP session in Reykjavik, they had honed a brand of calamitous post-everything guitar rock that was more-or-less their own. If they were this good when they could barely shave, how good would they be after they had written a couple dozen songs and toured the world a few times?

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