Black Midi – Schlagenheim (LP)

The London guitar band’s debut is twitchy, hair-raising, always on the move. They harken back to a more esoteric era of indie with a magnetic and dazzling style.
Schlagenheim offers prime counter-programming for our current rich, harmonic, verse-chorus-verse era of indie music. With a froggy-voiced singer and an armful of guitar pedals, black midi sprint in the opposite direction. They are a band for whom references become the main talking point—a chilling thought for anyone who prefers not to think about music through the lens of dudes prattling on about other dudes in older bands. All the indie rock tropes of old are summoned: exclusion, referentiality, insularity, recalling a time in the ’80s and ’90s when the underground just covered each other all the time.