I won’t lie.

It took me the first minute or so to wrap my head around what Midir were bringing to the table on their EP, Black Sludge, and it wasn’t until the Black Metal vocals gave way to punk/hardcore ones that I realised just what it was.

Total and utter fucking lunacy.

Midir are a mindfuck of epic proportions. They take influences from fucking everywhere. And I do mean fucking everywhere. There’s Black Metal. Death Metal. Doom Metal. Sludge Metal. Hardcore. Post Hardcore. Punk…and if you listen real close I could swear there’s a whiff of Taylor Swift in there as well.

Alright, I might have made that last one up, but my point remains the same, Midir refuse to be tarnished with one label and it’s a brave fucking move.

It would be easy to take all of those influences, throw them in a glass and come out with something that makes you vomit after your first sip, but somehow Midir gets away with it. Yes, Black Sludge is rough around the edges, but not in a way that is detrimental to the fact that Midir are ballsy enough to try something new, something different, and they stick the landing around 95% of the time.

The three songs on offer – Rot, Decay, and Feast – straddle multiple fences between multiple genres that are so wide that I’m surprised their balls don’t ache.

Black Sludge is a great introduction to Midir for anyone who has never heard the band before – like me, for example – and I hope they keep on pushing boundaries and challenging as many cliched tropes as possible. If they do then there’s no telling what they can accomplish.

Check out Black Sludge, as well as their other releases, over on the Midir Bandcamp page.