Former Black Midi singer-guitarist Geordie Greep takes stock of contemporary masculinity with his first solo album, The New Sound. Where Black Midi constructed elaborate worlds to tell stories about boxers and soldiers on albums like 2022’s Hellfire, Greep trains his focus on the type of men who worship at the altars of celebrity influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson here, going so far as to adopt their voices and stick with them long enough to show the cracks in their pumped-up egos.

Greep writes lyrics by the paragraph and sings them frantically, as though he’s terrified that a song will run out before he gets to say everything on his mind. “Blues” savagely dissects a man who “should pay [a beggar] to follow you around and play your theme” before directing him to confront the inevitability of decay and death, yet the narrator sounds as jerky as his target.

The...