Hellfire
| Black MidiHellfire
Hellfire is the third studio album by English rock band Black Midi, released on 15 July 2022 on Rough Trade Records. The band recorded the majority of the album over a thirteen-day period with producer Marta Salogni, who had previously worked with the band in recording the song "John L" from their second studio album. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
The preposterously talented English band’s third record is pitched between clinical precision and crazed abandon.
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Guitar
As difficult as it is beautiful, Black Midi’s third album shows that they know exactly what they’re doing, and exactly where they’re going – Hellfire is a worthy successor to their first two albums.
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The Guardian
exhilarating ambition.
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NME
Intense first-person narratives fuel a genre-gnarling thrill ride.
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Sputnik Music
Will this bear much impact on whatever freaksongs they churn out next? Probably not. After all, it’s suspiciously easy to reinvent yourself when you supposedly never took yourself particularly seriously to begin with.
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Post-Trash
It’s the most outright gorgeous piece on the album, a sincere love song that still ends in tears, if not complete misery for our protagonist as they move on to “Obviously Visiting Arena,” gently whispering of a lover “a mile away but doing so good”. Picton’s economy of language is concise, not reserved; grounded enough to empathize with. It is in that succinctness that Picton continues to best convey why I feel Black Midi stands ahead of their peers: simply they just “know a song that gives everything that you need”.
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Stereogum
Yet given the album’s tendency toward self-indulgent chaos, the parts of Hellfire that I connect with most are the quiet, graceful, pretty segments where the band gives its audience space to breathe between eruptions. It makes me wonder what these gnarled, nervy wiz kids might accomplish if age allows them to (ever so slightly) smooth out and loosen up.
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The Line of Best Fit
Hellfire is Black Midi at their most devilish and maniacal.
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Crack Magazine
Hellfire is absurd, self-indulgent, restless, ambitious and brutal. But it never feels forced. This is just who black midi are – a compelling group of musicians who seemingly never discard a musical idea. And still, somehow, this more-is-more approach has taken them from strength to strength. Hellfire is another puckishly extravagant success.
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Uncut
Unique London outfit wrestle with chaos on their explosive third album and achieve precise mayhem.
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Slant Magazine
A Concept Album Ripe for Repeat Listens.
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DIY Magazine
Although less esoteric than its predecessor ‘Cavalcade’, ‘Hellfire’ is a fiercely experimental record that sees black midi teeter back and forth on a crumbling precipice, halfway between unhinged madness and art rock precision.
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Paste Magazine
The London band’s third album is a grotesque carnival of human misery that you’ll never want to turn away from.
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When the Horn Blows
‘Hellfire’ is special and so is the hand that feeds it. We don’t do ratings here, but this sun has gone to my head, so I’m giving it a
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Our Culture
As much as they’re able to wring control out of chaos, black midi don’t pretend to have any kind of moral authority – they’re just players in the same game. If there’s one thing to be gleamed from it, it’s that raising hell can be quite a bit of fun.
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The Fire Note
The band creates layers after layers and their musicianship is only getting stronger. Their willingness to challenge is within every track on Hellfire as black midi consistently walks the line bordering sanity and madness. The best advice is just to sit back and straddle that line with them!
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Still Listening Magazine
Hellfire is a masterwork of confusion and creation. A cold world that affects everyone. In it, the sinners are heroes, and the saints are snakes. black midi have taken their talents as musicians and lyricists to a new level that begs us to question what music is supposed to be. This album is not so much post-punk as it is post-normality. Black midi have taken Hellfire and proven that nothing is sacred. There is no other, and there may never be again. But today, we have black midi.
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The Elite Extremophile
On Hellfire, black midi has further entrenched themselves in the world of avant-prog. This album is dense, weird, and eclectic. Despite so many disparate elements cohabitating, these sounds are not at odds with one another. In fact, everything fits together quite nicely.
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Treblezine
Hellfire asks a certain commitment in the listener, a certain level of attention and trust in black midi’s wildest ideas and least navigable gauntlets. The good news is just how exciting and endlessly entertaining every last one of black midi’s seemingly endless arsenal of ideas is on Hellfire—the sheer holy shit! of it all is boundless and repeatedly rewarding. Their aim might be to overwhelm, but just as often, they dazzle.
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The Quietus
Alluring antagonists, absurd anti-heroes and a byronic narrator to match, the third album from Black Midi is a righteous maelstrom.
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Medium
The British avant-rock trio’s third album matches searing lyrical imagery with explosive musical performances.
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Spectrum Culture
The London trio creates and solves their own puzzle by weaving intriguing and imaginative narratives.
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Clash Magazine
Appreciation of the album comes down to how much you’re willing to go with all this. Like Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! Trilogy, ‘Hellfire’ is at once goofy and high brow. A volcanic eruption of serious silliness.
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Riot Magazine
black midi are a truly generational band – and their distilled talent allows them to be fresh and invigorating with every release. As the group grow in prowess and confidence, the music grows in complexity and intrigue. black midi are a band writing themselves into music lore with each fascinating album.
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musicOMH
Third album from London trio adds another gem to the crown of a band who are fast becoming one of the very best of their era.
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Mystic Sons
black midi are like a Rubik's Cube that keeps changing its colours; just when you think you have figured it out, it morphs into something even harder to place. A merit that very few can say they can do even remotely well.
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Stereoboard
The audacious imagination on display here is often jaw-dropping, and the band’s more abrasive, confrontational qualities have been contextualised with conceptual diligence. Journeying into this musical underworld is a rich, carnival-esque experience, one that reaps singular rewards.
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Flood Magazine
Hellfire is full of hallucinogenic scenes where jazz, prog, electronic, and punk pretzel around each other until it looks like one musical gordian knot that can be extremely hard to penetrate for a new listener. Hellfire takes another step toward traditional songwriting even with an improvisational base. It’s a modern mutation on a traditional strain of ’70s rock and jazz jamming, but Black Midi remain mostly appealing three albums into their ascendant career. It’ll be intriguing to see what they mutate into for their fourth effort.
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25YL
This is Black Midi at their zenith, they have condensed what made their sound work, and whittled it down into a tight, knotty ball of madness. If all is right in the world, this album will be seen as an experimental rock essential. It would be acceptable for them to never make an album better than this, but seeing their freshly honed edge, truly, the hellions have the world at their fingers. What a show!
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Gigwise
Hellfire is nonetheless another great album from a captivating band still very early in their career. So, what to make of black midi? Well, what Hellfire shows is that they are more than just a variety of individual talents; they’re a group capable of creating exciting, vivid theatre through their music. Hellfire is less instant than Cavalcade, and perhaps less tight than Schlagenheim, but sit with it for a little while and allow its story to unfold before you: if one thing can be promised, it’s that you will have plenty of fun.
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Loud and Quiet
On tracks like ‘Eat Men Eat’, their art for making music that can swing with baffling ease between a heart-palpitating, pounding headbanger and a poppy acoustic guitar melody is evidently more evolved too. But it’s the moments like on ‘Still’, three-and-a-half minutes in, when there’s a kind of rupture in the album’s hellscape, that Black Midi’s power takes hold. Bird song, strings, flute, harmonica, and xylophone pool into a warm ray of light and weld together, before you’re thrown back into the hellfire, in the form of abrasive radio tuning, on ‘Half Time’. Bewildering and brilliant.
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Tinnitist
Gleefully obliterating the fine line between genius & insanity, the maverick U.K. trio unleash a chaotic cyclone of shape-shifting sound on their maximalist third album.
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Exclaim!
It takes immense skill to know what to keep while being one step ahead of the modern musical landscape, and Hellfire accomplishes both. That said, it's still impossible to see where the band will go next. A steep upward incline is horrifically on-brand for black midi, and it doesn't seem like they're afraid of heights.
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The Irish Times
a compelling album.
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Northern Transmissions
The mini-compositions that animate Hellfire bring a different energy than the free-jam freakouts of black midi’s past work, but they’re no less enthralling; it’s still hard to predict where any given track from the new suite will go. Many of Black Midi’s old songs are like endurance exercises, mbut trimming the fat to pull stronger focus has helped the band execute a stronger concept, resulting in Black Midi’s most consistent, fully realized, adventurous, and even daring effort yet.
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AllMusic
Seven-minute centerpiece "The Race Is About to Begin" impressively segues between frenetic, breathless ranting and starry crooning, and this sort of avant-lounge vibe continues throughout the remainder of the album. By the end of "27 Questions," you suspect that the band is in the process of writing a musical, or at the very least, the idea has crossed their minds.
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Stack
Black Midi deliver a dramatically visceral third album.
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Firstpost
black midi's third album Hellfire is willfully abrasive, dizzyingly frenetic, insidiously infectious, and uncompromisingly crafted.
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The Arts Desk
Nevertheless, whether Black Midi’s latest disc is a work of genius or an artistic representation of a migraine is firmly in the ear of the beholder. But Hellfire is without doubt an album that exudes some serious brass neck and is well worthy of an exploratory listen, if nothing else.
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