Cavalcade

The title track of their second album arrives not with a bang but with a slow, ceremonial unfolding — strings and horns entering like dignitaries taking their seats before something consequential. The arrangement is dense with orchestral color, Shabaka Hutchings' saxophone threading through the texture like a voice trying to be heard above ceremony. Black midi here sound less like a rock band and more like a chamber ensemble that has absorbed every jazz, prog, and post-punk tradition available to it and chosen to honor all of them simultaneously. The tempo maintains a stately processional quality, but beneath the elegance there is something deeply unsettled — the feeling of a parade moving through a city that knows it is burning. Geordie Greep's vocals carry an odd detachment, narrating rather than pleading, which makes the emotional stakes feel paradoxically higher. The production is clear and deliberate, each element occupying precise sonic space, which amplifies how controlled the chaos is. This is music for a particular kind of melancholy: not grief exactly, but the sensation of watching something grand and irreversible in motion. You reach for it in the late afternoon when the light is golden and heavy and the world feels simultaneously beautiful and completely doomed.