After his abrupt dissolving of the spiky art rock favourites, the singer has returned intent on making music ‘for your ears, not your brain’

Geordie Greep has a knack for proclamations. When the 25-year-old musician meets me at a bar in Soho, London, he barely speaks above a whisper over the course of our 90-minute conversation – a surprising contrast to the charismatic frontman of Black Midi he’s presented as for the past few years. But less than 10 minutes in he’s already dished out a handful of loosely interconnected mantras for modern life: “The metric of whether it’s a good bar is if you feel like it’s someone’s house”; “There’s no saying sorry in America – they think you’re taking the piss”; “The best thing about London is that everyone’s really nice – in America, everyone’s looking for a chance to get ahead”. Spend a day with Greep and you’d probably end up with a pamphlet’s-worth of rules on how to live.

Greep’s debut solo album – coming after he unceremoniously announced Black Midi’s disbandment on Instagram earlier this year – is its own proclamation, too: on the state of music, manhood and “The Greep”, the Brit School kid who in the space of a few short years became one of indie rock’s most feverishly loved and fervently hated frontmen. The album is called The New Sound though it’s actually a gloriously rendered pastiche of a lot of old sounds – Steely Dan studio sleaze, fizzy Tropicália, the dishevelled glamour and acerbic wit of early-60s Judy Garland.