John L

A voice announces itself with the calm of a man reading minutes at a board meeting, while behind it a guitar and a violin start to circle each other like animals that have not yet decided to fight. That is the opening posture of "John L," and it sets up everything the song does: it describes the rise and ruin of a powerful leader, and it lets the music itself behave like a crowd on the edge of turning.

It is a song about authority, and about how authority is a performance that only works while everyone agrees to watch.

Most songs about tyrants either mock the tyrant or mourn the revolution. "John L" does neither. It stays in the moment where a following discovers its own strength, which is the most dangerous and most interesting moment in any story of power.

That choice of focus is why the song rewards repeated listening. The first pass is about momentum and noise. The later passes are about who is speaking, who is answering, and what each voice wants from the exchange.

Where the song comes from

"John L" was released on 23 March 2021 as the lead single from Cavalcade, the second album by the London band black midi^[1]. The group had formed in 2017 around students from the BRIT School and came up through the Windmill scene in Brixton^[4]. Their 2019 debut, Schlagenheim, was built largely from spontaneous group improvisation. For the follow-up, singer and guitarist Geordie Greep said the band reversed that method and built songs from individual ideas instead^[3].

The timing mattered. Guitarist and vocalist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin had stepped away from the band to focus on his mental health, and he holds a writing credit on the track^[1][3]. The result is a group that sounds both more deliberate and more unstable than before.

The single was produced by Marta Salogni in London, while most of the album was recorded in Dublin with John "Spud" Murphy^[1][3]. A helicopter flying over the studio was picked up by the microphones, and the band joked about crediting the pilot^[1]. Salogni went on to produce the band's third album, Hellfire, which is probably why the song is sometimes mistakenly attached to that record.

A story told as a collapse

The narrative is simple and old. A figure holds enormous power over a following, the followers turn on that figure, and he is destroyed. Wikipedia summarizes it as a leader betrayed and killed by those who served him^[1], and press coverage at the time framed it as a cult leader being overthrown by his own devotees^[3].

What makes the telling unusual is the register. The vocal is largely spoken, ominous, and sometimes booming, closer to a sermon or a courtroom address than a sung verse^[2]. Dialogue and exchange drive the lyric more than description does. The listener is placed inside the room where the scene happens, hearing voices that are certain, then less certain, then something else entirely.

There is a moral texture here that is easy to miss. The followers are not presented as noble liberators, and the leader is not presented as a pure monster. Both sides are caught in a bargain, and the bargain is what collapses. Reading the song as a story about a single bad man misses how much of it concerns the people who made him possible.

That is also what makes the cult framing so useful. A cult is simply an extreme version of what many groups do, which is to hand one person the job of holding everyone's meaning. When that person fails or is removed, the meaning has to go somewhere, and the song is interested in where it goes.

The music enacts the theme

The track is built on a call-and-response guitar riff, with noise, key banging, intricate drumming, and dissonant piano and strings around it^[3][1]. Violinist Jerskin Fendrix adds a jagged line that one critic compared to the Mahavishnu Orchestra^[1].

A Treble reviewer placed the band somewhere between noise rock, post-punk, and prog, and heard something like King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" in the approach, with violin and spoken word replacing saxophone and shouted vocals^[2]. The mxdwn announcement notes that the song was inspired by King Crimson's Discipline^[3].

The same reviewer wrote that the central feeling is control about to be lost, with the band holding chaos back just far enough to suggest it might win without ever letting it fully take over^[2]. That description is nearly a summary of the plot. A leader's grip is also a form of restraint, and the arrangement keeps pulling against its own leash until the structure gives way.

The dynamics reinforce this. The band moves between passages of near-stillness and violent density, and the transitions feel less like planned section changes than like a mood in a room shifting. Anyone who has watched a meeting or a crowd turn will recognize the sensation.

The album it opens is arranged around the same idea of balance and rupture. The Cavalcade tracklist runs from "John L" through "Marlene Dietrich," "Chondromalacia Patella," "Slow," "Diamond Stuff," "Dethroned," "Hogwash and Balderdash," and "Ascending Forth"^[3]. A song called "Dethroned" appearing later in that sequence gives the opener's theme an echo, even though the two songs are distinct pieces.

The video and the replaceable god

The video, directed and choreographed by Nina McNeely, extends the story into ritual^[3]. Dancers in skin-tight brown outfits move in response to a god-like figure with an Illuminati-style eye in place of a head. That figure collapses and a new one rises to take its place^[3].

This last detail changes the meaning. If the fallen figure is simply replaced, then the song is not a tale of liberation but of a cycle. The crowd does not abolish the throne. It only changes who sits there, which suggests that the hunger for a leader is the real subject.

It is worth noting how the visual treatment compensates for the abstraction of the words. A listener who hears only the spoken exchanges might not know whether they are watching an uprising, a trial, or a ceremony. The dancers resolve some of that ambiguity by treating the whole thing as ritual, with the leader as an idol and the crowd as a body that moves in unison until it does not.

The body language of the video is also a clue to the song's sense of scale. Everything is stylized and a little theatrical, which suggests that the band is less interested in a realistic cult exposé than in the shape of the event, the way a tower of authority leans and then goes over.

Alternative readings

The most direct reading is a cautionary tale about cults and charismatic authority. A second is political: leaders as stand-ins for any institution that depends on belief, whether a movement, a government, or a band.

A third reading looks at the band itself. A group that had just been hailed as a leading act of a scene, and that was losing a founding member, might well be thinking about how fragile collective loyalty is. Nothing in the sources confirms this, and the band has not explained the song in those terms, so it is best held loosely.

A fourth is formal. The song may simply be a showcase for tension and release, with the story serving as a frame for the sound. Critics responded most to the music: Pitchfork named it Best New Track and praised its dissonant avant-prog style^[1], while another reviewer found the vocals the weak point^[1].

The critical response leaned toward the thrill rather than the message. The Pitchfork track review argued that the triumph of the song is not that these well-trained musicians keep confounding expectations, but that the dissonance ends up sounding almost anthemic^[1]. That is a revealing observation, because anthems are exactly what crowds sing in unison, and the song makes a crowd out of its own chaos.

In that sense the sound and the story are mirror images. A conventional anthem unifies people behind a leader or cause. This one unifies people in the act of tearing a leader down, and then, through the video, hints that unity may only be the first step toward a new leader.

Why it resonates

Plenty of rock songs celebrate rebellion. Fewer treat the rebellion as an unreliable event, one that may reproduce the structure it overthrows. "John L" manages that by giving the listener an enormous amount of energy and then declining to supply a clean moral.

It also functions as a statement of intent for the album. By opening Cavalcade with a piece that is both precise and on the verge of coming apart, the band announced a record concerned with control, collapse, and the strange pleasure of watching both^[3].

For listeners coming from the band's debut, the single also marked a shift in how much narrative they were willing to carry. Where earlier material leaned on texture and improvisation, this one has a spine of events, even if the events arrive in fragments. That is part of why it works as an entry point to the album.

It also helps explain why the band could sustain such a heavy dose of chaos without losing the audience. The story gives the noise somewhere to point. Each lurch of the arrangement can be heard as a pressure in the crowd, and each moment of calm as a held breath.

Conclusion

"John L" is a story about a ruler's end, told by music that cannot quite stay in order itself. Its power comes from the match between subject and sound: a structure that strains, a voice that insists, and a crowd that eventually stops listening.

What lingers is the final image of the video more than the ending of the plot. The god falls, another takes the place, and the dancers keep moving.