By the 2020s, the pentagram had lost its power to shock. Occult symbols decorated mass-market fast-fashion hoodies and suburban bedrooms. Recognizing this cultural exhaustion, South London trio black midi took the infernal concept in an entirely different direction with their 2022 single "Welcome to Hell," the centerpiece of their critically praised third studio LP, Hellfire.
Where Venom relied on ancient goat-headed demons, black midi frontman Geordie Greep populated his hell with shore-leave soldiers, crooked boxing promoters, and shell-shocked conscripts. The track chronicles Private Tristan Bongo, an infantryman descending into an adrenaline-soaked, debauched underworld during wartime leave. The horror here is not supernatural damnation; it is the grotesque, mechanical reality of human exploitation.
The visual world built around the record matched this thematic departure. Designed alongside typographer David Rudnick and artist Hiro Fontana, the album sleeve for Hellfire eschewed black-and-gold minimalism for a dizzying, hyper-detailed painterly sprawl. The artwork evokes Hieronymus Bosch rewritten for the age of sensory bombardment: gambling dens, neon signs, race tracks, and apocalyptic hellscapes colliding in a feverish visual blur.
The official music video for black midi's "Welcome to Hell," directed by Gustaf Holtenäs, further dismantled extreme metal aesthetics. Rendered in hallucinatory, morphing animation, the short film depicted violent military absurdity, grotesque body transformations, and decaying neon cities. The track utilized furious avant-garde rock structures, jagged math-rock time signatures, flamenco accents, and machine-gun drumming from Morgan Simpson, to evoke an inferno grounded in human institutions rather than medieval mythology.
