Midway through their ambitious 2021 debut, For the First Time, Black Country, New Road jokingly called themselves “the world's second-best Slint tribute act.” Between frontman Isaac Wood’s agitated sprechgesang and the group’s queasy, off-center grooves, the self-inflicted burn made sense—and could have applied to a whole wave of nervy, British post-punk upstarts who talked more than they sang and attracted critical adoration around the turn of the decade.
Since then, things changed fast, even by the mercurial currents of UK rock scenes. Fontaines D.C. rose to arena status. Shame pivoted to a more melodic sound. black midi split. But no peer has transformed more dramatically than BC,NR. Wood stopped muttering and started singing, bringing a stately grandiosity to 2022’s Ants From Up There—then departed the group before the album was even released. His bandmates chose to retain the name but not the songbook, sharing vocal duties and hurriedly composing new material in time for summer festival dates that they had thought would be in support of Ants.
If most bands release live albums as a stopgap release (or, less generously, a cash-in), 2023’s Live at Bush Hall was something else: a document of a band reborn. Its songs were jubilant (“Up Song”), tender (“Turbines/Pigs”), democratic—and, in a rare move for a band today, without studio equivalents. In typical fashion, Black Country are already distancing themselves from that era. “I just didn’t want to hang out with those songs anymore,” Tyler Hyde, bassist and one of three vocalists, told Rolling Stone UK.
Now, three years after Wood’s departure, comes the studio debut of this new incarnation. And Slint, frankly, is not one of the first 2,000 reference points that come to mind. Folky and pastoral, with recorder solos and mandolin excursions and proggy journeys-in-song, Forever Howlong is as ambitious as anything this band has done. But the album radiates a deep warmth, a communal spirit that courses through the harmonies and stylistic shifts, one that has sustained this six-piece through years of upheaval and reinvention. This is music with an unabashedly twee heart, overflowing with baroque instrumentation and melody—the very things a sardonic post-punk group might regard with suspicion.
With saxophonist Lewis Evans choosing to step away from the mic, vocal and lyric duties are now shared between three women. Violinist Georgia Ellery, also of Jockstrap fame, has the most expressive voice and buoyant pop hooks. Her “Besties,” which kicks off the album in a burst of technicolor harmonies, seems like a straightforward paean to female friendship before revealing a layer of unrequited queer yearning: “I know I want something more,” the narrator cryptically concedes, complicating the song’s cheery façade. Ellery’s writing is dynamic enough to bridge far-flung centuries together: Who the hell mentions TikTok in a song that opens with a Baroque-sounding harpsichord overture? Similarly, what sort of medieval traveler gets betrayed by a man who looks “just like James Dean,” as does the poor heroine of Ellery’s “Two Horses,” a slow, winding narrative whose violent denouement ought to come with a warning label for equestrian lovers?
