The classically trained musicians in Black Country, New Road are beaming with pride over learning an instrument most children master by the third grade. The British band’s pianist and accordionist, May Kershaw, had envisioned “stacked clarinets,” or something similarly complicated and florid, atop the piano composition she brought to her bandmates. Instead, guitarist Luke Mark and drummer Charlie Wayne learned how to play the recorder.
At first, Mark and Wayne replicated Kershaw’s arrangement note by note while watching their bandmate’s hands on the piano. With their limited experience on the recorder, it understandably started as a simple song, Wayne notes, but “it gets more complex by the end because we just got better at playing as we were arranging it.” The band agrees that “Forever Howlong” was a song they could never have made three years ago. As Kershaw’s lilting, lovely melodies shapeshift over the recorder orchestra, there’s an intensity to the band’s unprecedented restraint; no guitars, no drums, no crashing, caterwauling crescendo, nothing that typically arrives in a Black Country, New Road song to signify the magnitude of their ambition. The finished product is now the title track of Black Country, New Road’s new album—one of many examples of a band that had to relearn the basics for a bold reinvention.
The newest iteration of Black Country, New Road debuts today with “Besties,” a lead single that will be followed by several more in the next two months. Once Forever Howlong drops, on April 4, via Ninja Tune, the same lineup that made the songs will play them live for the next year or so at varying clubs, theaters and festivals. Barring any unforeseen disaster, this will be the first time Black Country, New Road have the privilege of a completely unremarkable, textbook album rollout. And, as woodwind player Lewis Evans notes, it takes some getting used to. “There’s no structure. We’re just milling around.”
To recap the past seven years: Black Country, New Road began in 2018, and their debut album, For the First Time, arrived in February 2021 as the culmination of an “18-month journey” where they emerged from the Brixton Windmill’s wildly creative and competitive post-punk scene to five-star reviews and Radiohead comparisons in NME and The Guardian. By the time the United Kingdom had started to loosen pandemic-era restrictions on live music in the summer, the band had already moved on to performing the bulk of what was to become sophomore album Ants From Up There. The album, however, never got a proper transatlantic tour because frontman Isaac Wood shocked fans by quitting the group on January 31, 2022—four days before the release of Ants From Up There. BCNR Reddit stans and the remaining members of the band agreed on one point—Wood’s quavering, scene-chewing delivery and dense wordplay were irreplaceable. So, with bassist Tyler Hyde, Lewis Evans, and May Kershaw splitting lead vocals, Black Country, New Road honored their booked tour dates, but played entirely new music, most of it barely a few weeks old by the time crowds heard it. Rather than saving these songs for a more conventional studio LP, they released the whimsical, wondrous concert film and album Live at Bush Hall, in 2023, marking the third consecutive February with a new BCNR full-length.
It’s easy to see “Besties” as an unofficial sequel to “Up Song,” the Bush Hall opener that addressed any lingering skepticism about Wood’s sudden departure with the joyous refrain “Look what we did together/BCNR friends forever!” After all, friendship tends to get short shrift in pop songwriting compared to the dizzying highs and terrifying lows of romance. That shift in lyrical focus creates a pretty clear dividing line between the new version of Black Country, New Road and the previous one fronted by Wood. The latter version became a quintessential “band for the highly online,” endlessly debated and deconstructed in Reddit threads and Genius pages that annotated Wood’s angsty, hyper-referential lyrics about Kanye West, fellow Windmill graduates Black Midi, and having wet dreams about Charli XCX. It was all very… guy-coded, and Ants From Up There truly was a tears-in-your-beer album about romantic torment that had plenty in common with extra-emo epics like Bright Eyes’ Lifted and Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor.
As for Forever Howlong, “it’s not a guy’s breakup album, that’s for sure,” violinist, guitarist, and Jockstrap singer Georgia Ellery quips. All of the band members agree that they had to check themselves repeatedly to stay subtle, less melodramatic. The group’s three female members, Hyde, Kershaw, and Ellery, share lead vocals across Forever Howlong, engaging in what the latter calls a “healthy competition” refereed by producer James Ford, “an absolute machine” who worked 16-hour days for three weeks. “It’s a pretty wide spectrum of womanhood,” Hyde explains. “The three of us have been raised in different ways and gone through different things, and it really touches on a lot of general feelings of humanity as well as specific events that have happened to us. It’s a small encyclopedia.”
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Georgia Ellery: I think we were quite anti-that.
Lewis Evans: Totally.
Charlie Wayne: We haven’t got the luxury of being Big Thief and just having a “Vampire Empire” up our sleeves. It was so nice to just write and do nothing but write and not be in that cycle.
Ellery: You guys aren’t on the Reddit pages, are you?
Mark: Well, I’m blocked off. It’s an unholy place. Not that there’s anything wrong with people there, but no one should have that much knowledge about what people think about you.
Wayne: My mom and my cousin Ben are really clued up on it. My mom is on the Reddit a lot, so she’s always asking about what’s happening. I obviously think that having such an involved fan base is exciting and has benefited us immeasurably. I imagine it’s probably the reason why we’re here now, given how much the band has changed and how much people stood by us and actually embraced the change as part of what materially creates the band and what makes the band interesting. There will always be factions within that and people really attached to, “oh, the band will never be the same without Isaac.” It’s true; the band will never be the same without Isaac, but that is what it is. I think you don’t really know how extensively to engage with it because it’s not yours to engage with anyway. They’re people that like the music, but you don’t owe them anything; you shouldn’t owe them anything because they exist as their own thing.
Wayne: I remember being really excited by the idea of playing the Windmill for the first time, because I remember being 15 in Cambridge and that sort of scene. When we eventually started playing there, that was obviously cool.
Tyler Hyde: I think them breaking up is a sign of perhaps different times that we live in now, where people just stop making music together because it doesn’t suit what they want to do anymore. And that’s quite refreshing. Obviously, you do also think about how people’s worlds have just changed. The fans of Black Midi, they are so intensely into that band, and I can’t imagine what it was like for them. Overall, I’m just happy for those guys to move on and do what they’re doing now, which is great stuff.
Evans: Georgia doesn’t sing on any of the Bush Hall songs, so the fact that the first single would be Georgia’s first recorded vocal moment in the band is really cool, and, also, it’s just a triumphant opening.
Ellery: Luke, You had a hot take on why that should be the first single.
Mark: It’s got a lot of elements that are key to the album, the instrumental palette and the multiple vocals panned out so that you can hear the individual voices. While having that, it’s a catchy and satisfying song, but it's not too close to anything we’ve done before. Also, definitely the thing about it being Georgia’s first song with the band and no one having heard her sing with us before on a recording is very important. But, also, we were very specific in that we wanted to do a single from each singer on the album. One, it’s a bit of a flex, to be honest. Two, it’s to give people an idea of what we’re trying to do. Before we even had a song from everybody, we were talking about how difficult it would be to make an album work with multiple vocalists that actually felt worthwhile, not just a token song from someone here like you often get on some albums. It had to be something that felt like everybody is a lead in their own moment, yet it’s cohesive and adhesive as the last album. I think we pulled it off.
Kershaw: Tyler.
Hyde: It wasn’t like that, OK? It was so much more reluctant than that.
Evans: You sat us down.
Hyde: “Guys, I’m taking over.” I think, at the time, I was about to do some shows, I just began my solo path and just had some things that we could play along to, so it just naturally happened like that.
Hyde: It can be difficult. Sometimes I might write something and I really like it and I’m worried about what might happen to my little baby. We did this residency when we were writing the album in Falmouth [in Cornwall, England], and I played a couple songs on the piano. And I felt that way about both of those songs when I was showing everyone. I was kind of nervous because I didn’t know whether I wanted to give it to them. One of them, as much as I love it, didn’t make sense for the band, and, as soon as I played it to everyone, it felt that way, and I was kind of relieved by that.
Then the other one, everyone was like, “OK. I can see where this is going.” Then something clicks and it becomes something that you could never have done by yourself. If you wanted it to be a rock song, I can’t rock out alone—right now anyway. It’s a lot of trust and it’s a lot of belief. We’ve been doing this together for so many years now that once your song is in any of these people’s hands, you just know that it’s going to be OK—better than OK, it’s going to be great. That decision is a challenge sometimes, but it’s very easy as soon as you release it.
Evans: I think, from an outside perspective, from someone who’s not brought the songs to this record, there is actually so much variation in what constitutes a song that feels like we could develop further. There’s ones that practically arrange themselves and it’s just gone like that. Like Tyler’s song, “Happy Birthday”—because it was towards the end of the process and we could feel where we were musically already, that just arranged itself, that was so quick. Then there’s other ones that, whether it’s because they’re really hard to learn or because of its style, can be way harder to arrange. I thought “Cold Country” took us so long to arrange and to get a version that we were really happy with because of the way that it was when you presented it to us. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a Black Country, New Road song when it came in, or that it wasn’t a song that we could make the best out of. It’s just in a harder state to arrange. It just doesn’t feel like there’s any specific requirements to a song for it to become good.
Mark: I think that the scope of what we’re capable of doing as a group has broadened a lot over the last year and a half or so. We used to be kind of stuck to certain habits and certain things were easy to do with the instrumentation that we had, and certain things we knew worked so that it would be exciting when we played it live and people would really latch onto it. And then we’d feel good about it and then we’d feel confident about putting it out or whatever. I think we’ve kind of let go of quite a lot of that. Obviously, not all of it, because everyone has their own neuroses about what’s cool and what’s not cool or whatever, and that’s tough when there’s six people. On the whole we tend to agree, and in the end, there’s a lot of different kinds of songs on the album that I don’t think we could’ve done before, but we can now.
Hyde: I’d be lying if I said I’ve never felt that before. But, obviously, with these guys, it’s just become totally inspiring, and, also, I admire them so much. I’ve just totally accepted that I can’t write the songs that these guys write and I’m just so lucky to be in the same band because then I can claim them as my song. I’m joking, but I’m kind of not. I’m just really grateful to be associated with the music that these guys make.
Evans: It’s also that you have a part in it as well; you arrange stuff and you write in stuff, too, so it is your songs as well.
Kershaw: Yeah, I feel the same. So inspiring.
Wayne: You are super nasty, though, about it. Whenever Tyler or Georgia wasn’t in the room, May would just like—
Ellery: May, you’d be so mean! [laughs]
May: I feel like, being surrounded by amazing songwriters and arrangers, it just raises you. You want to keep up with everyone.
Wayne: I think also there’s something to that in how the record becomes consistent. There are three separate primary songwriters, but when you’re writing stuff within a timeframe, things start to reflect one another. That’s how an album becomes an album.
