The beginning of this year has been the start of a run of gigs where I’ve seen bands I’ve pretty much never heard before. Heavy Lungs, Milk Teeth, and now Black Midi.

It’s risky going to see a band you’ve never heard before, based solely on the poster – it has the potential to set you up for a disappointing evening. On the other hand, you might discover your new favourite band.

In the end, neither was true.

The evening’s support came from Jerskin Fendrix, an unassuming looking man in a brown trench coat. I knew even less about Fendrix than Black Midi – I had managed to listen to a few BM songs on YouTube beforehand, but I was going in to Jerskin’s set totally fresh.

Jerskin Fendrix’s setup was simple – a laptop and two, possibly three microphones. One was clean, one vocoded and one auto tuned. With a press of the spacebar, out came the music, which was pre-recorded.

When Fendrix performs live, emphasis really is on the ‘performance’ aspect. The music itself moves jarringly from atmospheric to childlike to seemingly hostile to the audience – at one point, Fendrix asks the sound tech to “make sure the next track is really loud”.

It’s not for everyone, and that’s a theme this evening. Once Jerskin screams his last few syllables, leaving everyone to try to make sense of what’s they’ve just seen, there’s a short break and then it’s time for the main event.

There’s about 10 or 15 minutes of Gregorian chanting (yeah, that’s right) before the band take to the stage. From then on, throw all the preconceptions you have about guitar based music out of the windows, because Black Midi will either be a revelation or the worst thing you’ve ever heard.

Black Midi have been described as “the best band in the country” by various publications. I heard them described as “challenging” by a guy standing near me. I would describe them as different, and bravely so. They’re clearly not trying to court mainstream attention, and they truly are making music that they want to listen to. If others want to listen to it too, that’s great! However, that doesn’t seem to be their main motivation.

Black Midi are like the audio equivalent of those word puzzles where you have to change one letter at a time to ultimately make it a different word. Their music relies on stretching an idea to its limits, being mangled, interrupted, and then ultimately snapping back to its initial form. It’s fresh and it’s easy to see why they have such a fanatic following – I’ve never before heard so much buzz about a new band prior to their live appearance as I have about Black Midi.

What makes it even more impressive is that there’s an almost refreshing lack of self-promotion going on, and whenever they do choose to use social media, it’s often nonchalant and ambivalent, as if their success and popularity is second to their creative output, made all the more unusual given the the members of Black Midi are alumni of the Brit School. Yeah, the same Brit School that birthed the careers of Amy Winehouse, Adele and even current Spider-Man Tom Holland.

It’s difficult to distinguish where one song ends and another begins. The band never directly engage the audience, preferring instead to let you experience their music as it feels like it was intended – a long, almost unbroken wave of music, rising and falling from calm melodicism to belligerent noise.

Would I see them again? Undoubtedly. There are very few other bands like them, and whilst I may not have found my new favourite band, it pays to take a chance sometimes.