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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