Black Midi - Cavalcade (LP)

Cavalcade is the second studio album by English rock band Black Midi. It was released on 28 May 2021, through Rough Trade Records. The album was primarily recorded in the summer of 2020 with producer John "Spud" Murphy, with the exception of the song John L, which was recorded beforehand with Marta Salogni.

For Cavalcade, the band had a more premeditated approach to the writing and recording, as opposed to the improvisational approach taken for their debut studio album, Schlagenheim (2019). The opening track John L was released as a single in promotion of the album, followed by a louder mix of the fourth track Slow and finally Chondromalacia Patella before its release. The album received widespread acclaim, with critics complimenting the band's stylistic progression and composition.

The music of Cavalcade has been primarily described as progressive rock, experimental rock, jazz fusion, math rock and avant-prog. The album's lyrics revolve around depictions of "larger than life figures", with the figures depicted ranging from "a cult leader fallen on hard times and an ancient corpse found in a diamond mine to legendary cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich, strolling seductively past them".

Cavalcade has been greeted with considerable acclaim from music reviewers. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, Cavalcade received a score of 81, based on 22 reviews.