Black Country, New Road Go Howling Into New Horizons on Forever Howlong
Hot off the release of a fantastic new studio album, the band unleashed its prog-folk odysseys upon the Moore Theatre in May
I learned something new about Black Country, New Road when I saw them at the Moore Theatre last month: they’re the rare rock band to feature a conductor. Her name is May Kershaw, and she’s also the band’s pianist. That is, when she’s not trading roles with the bassist. Or casually busting out an accordion. Hold the phone, did the drummer just whip out a banjo?
If it’s hard to keep up with the UK six-piece, it’s only because they’ve built their foundation on a dynamic spirit of collectivism. Not content to stick to defined roles, the six musicians on stage are in a state of constant flux: rearranging, deconstructing, taking each other’s ideas, building on top of them, passing them back. Even the title of their exquisite new record, Forever Howlong, was born of an earcatching turn of phrase coined by one member and picked up by the rest of the band. It’s hard to imagine a better origin story for an album that mines playfulness from unpredictability, and storybook drama from the everyday.
It doesn’t take long for the band to find it. Album opener “Besties” takes off on an effervescent harpsichord overture, and lands on a group-vocal chorus that might court arenas if it weren’t so hard to pin down. Before you can strap yourself in, the group has swerved into a stuttering six-four beat that makes tangible the nervous queer longing of the lyrics. Each member’s individual part feels at once undergirding and independent, just as effective playing support as it is adding its own unique twist to the story.
The group has gone on record citing legendary Canadian-American roots-rockers The Band as a guiding star: “We’d just think ‘what would The Band do?’” joked bassist Tyler Hyde in a Stereogum interview. While the sonic similarities between the two are dubious — you’re not likely to hear any of BCNR’s vocalists adopt a southern drawl anytime soon — it’s not hard to hear the spirit of The Band in the tight interplay and conversational nature of the group’s instrumentals.
The band playtested this material on the road long before putting it to tape. I first heard it when they swung through Nashville in May 2024, at which point the defeated final cry of “Nancy Tries to Take the Night” resolved on a major chord, like in a sacred chorale. In that same Stereogum interview nearly a year (and presumably many playtests) later, Hyde described that original outro as “naff as hell.” Submitting new drafts to the audience night after night has graced these songs with comfortability and confidence, but removed none of the dizzying restlessness of the group’s arrangements. Every melody comes loaded with an unexpected harmonic twist; the echo of “why don’t we try this?” reverberates in every note.
This road has been trod by pop mad scientists of the past like Van Dyke Parks, but even he needed a raft full of session musicians to realize his vision. BCNR’s live show makes it all the more impressive that they summoned this colorful cast of sounds in-house. It should be noted, of course, that they enlisted the guidance of vogue indie producer James Ford this time around. Ford is coming off a big year, having just produced blockbuster albums for The Last Dinner Party and Fontaines DC — two of BCNR’s contemporaries in the bustling scene formed around London’s Windmill pub. However, Ford seems less interested in drumming up the sumptuous, widescreen sweep he brought to these recent projects, opting instead to let the band’s intimate dynamic speak for itself.
Overdubs and effects are scant — what you hear on the record is largely what you hear live. That’s not to say Ford left his bag of tricks at home — the mono first movement of “For the Cold Country” sounds like it was recorded in a mildew-scented cabin, making it all the more gobsmacking when it conspicuously goes high-fidelity in its second half. Through it all, Ford’s touch does nothing to dilute the ornate sound the band manages to muscle up with a relatively small ensemble. They’re a six-person studio orchestra, a bite-size Wrecking Crew.
It’s a good thing, too, because the scope of the band’s storytelling is wider than ever. When frontman and sole lyricist Isaac Wood abruptly left the group in 2022, he brought with him an anguished, pop-culture-philic vulnerability that had defined the band since its inception and earned it much of its cult following. That he left a band of six other whiz-kid songwriters and arrangers was both a boon and an open question — on the one hand, the band was able to launch into writing new material without an intermission, but on the other, how would they maintain a consistent lyrical voice with such a strong set of competing auteurs rising to fill the void?
A provisional answer came in the form of 2023’s Live at Bush Hall, a concert film comprising songs written by the other members in the immediate wake of Wood’s departure. The short version was that they didn’t, but that didn’t really matter — whatever Bush Hall lacked in lyrical depth it more than made up for in friendship-bracelet charm. What’s more, it served as proof of concept for the band’s future, one that would involve decidedly fewer anxiety-ridden references to celebrities, and a more florid, democratic sound. Arriving with a greater sense of precision and a more confident approach, Forever Howlong delivers on that promise laughing all the way to the renaissance fair. In the process it narrows the spotlight to shine on three chief songwriter-vocalists: bassist Tyler Hyde, violinist Georgia Ellery, and pianist May Kershaw.
The three aren’t overly concerned with tying a cohesive thread between their material, but the album is all the more fascinating for it. Instead of forcing its songwriters to dish out of the same thematic bowl, Forever Howlong paints their varied lyrical approaches alongside one another in a triptych. In the first and largest panel there’s Hyde, whose frequently tortured writing cuts closest to Wood’s. In the next, Kershaw’s preoccupations with nature, workaday beauty, and the medieval call to mind mid-century writers of pastorals like Connie Converse. Put more glibly, she's Vashti Bunyan for the cottagecore generation. And finally there’s Ellery, who smuggles the anachronistic quirk and off-kilter hooks of her side project Jockstrap into more ambitious song structures.
What that leaves is the album equivalent of friends trading stories over a campfire. When Ellery licks the wounds of unrequited love on “Besties,” Kershaw is there to cheer her up with an abstrusely uplifting parable about beets on “The Big Spin.” When Kershaw finds herself beset by loneliness later on in the title track, she creates a fertile bed for the yearning of Ellery’s “Goodbye” to blossom out of. The approach only accentuates the idiosyncratic edges of each writer’s material — like how in “Salem Sisters,” Hyde takes a bubbly piano figure and one of the most life-affirming melodies of the year, only to pen up a macabre metaphor for social anxiety in which she’s burned alive at a backyard barbeque. Eat your heart out, Randy Newman.
Commenting on the diversity, drummer Charlie Wayne told DIY Magazine that "[The album is] exploring different perspectives and how these can come together to find meaning in shared experiences.” The three’s vocal harmonies, then, become more than simply gorgeous window dressing — they’re the glue binding Hyde, Ellery, and Kershaw’s observations together, a shared language which they can tap into only by layering their voices. Across the album, the three tend to gravitate towards stories about women facing adversity. The narrator of “Nancy Tries to Take the Night” grapples with an unplanned pregnancy, “Two Horses” with a charming predator, “Mary” with primary school bullies. When one singer bares her soul, the other two are there to validate her story through harmony. It’s telling that many of the album’s most despondent moments are also its most pared-back. The group talked up the power of friendship on Live at Bush Hall, but usually in a way that didn’t leave a lot to the imagination: “Look at what we did together, BCNR friends forever.” Here, the idea is baked into the very sound of the album. Pain weighs less when it's shared, and sometimes music sounds a little sweeter too.
Richer stories demand a richer set of colors, and the band widens their instrumental palette accordingly — or is it accordion-ly? Making their first appearance on a Black Country, New Road studio album are mandolin, banjo, recorder, harpsichord, lap steel, and accordion. Gimmicks, these additions are not; you could be forgiven for thinking BCNR have played these instruments for years, even when they haven’t. For the urban Canterbury tale of the title track, the group learned to play the recorder together; amusingly, the song’s arrangement reflects their growing confidence with the instrument. What starts as a simple hot-cross-buns shadow to Kershaw’s vocal line progressively builds in complexity until erupting into a minimalist waltz in the climax.
The symbiosis between Lewis Evans’s saxophone and Ellery’s violin has always been a defining feature of the band’s sound; having had her violin crushed in a touring accident before hitting the studio, Ellery meets Evans halfway by switching to mandolin, bringing a bright earthiness to the album’s sound. It’s a substituted ingredient that only makes the dish sweeter.
These shades are applied to BCNR’s most protean set of songs yet. Much like an early Genesis album, Forever Howlong centers around a handful of maximalist prog-folk epics (in this case, “Two Horses,” “For the Cold Country,” and “Nancy Tries to Take the Night”) cemented together by shorter, more pop-forward songs. The unbounded structures give the band plenty of room to flex their penchant for musical storytelling; “Two Horses,” which builds from a yearning, moss-scented guitar ballad to a country-western chase song, is rife with little instrumental squiggles that bring its story to life. When Ellery hits the road with her “hair blowing in the wind,” she communicates the feeling with a blissful vocal bridge. When Evans’s saxophone rises to gild it in harmony, it’s impossible not to feel like a freewheeling cowboy galloping across the Montanan countryside. Once the narrator’s amour is revealed to be a horse-icidal manipulator, Evans tosses in a little five-note villain motif. It’s just as much fun to dissect as it sounds like it was to make.
But behind its proggy ambition, the appeal of Forever Howlong is very simple: it is explosively, irresistibly melodic. You can’t lift up a hook on the album without uncovering a colorful assortment of mini-hooks wriggling around underneath. Watch them scatter in the final chorus of “Salem Sisters,” where saxophone and mandolin soar in harmony over Hyde’s vocal line while her bandmates answer underneath in counterpoint. At its peak, there are around four different stories being told at the same time. The dream of The Zombies’s Odessey and Oracle is alive. Even the percussion sings along — Charlie Wayne’s drums don’t trace the shape of other instruments so much as they draw their own, and he plays a vital role in visualizing the nature-centric imagery of the lyrics. Puddle-jumping cymbal taps bring summer rain in “Salem Sisters,” while operatic crashes summon thunder on “For the Cold Country.” On both, Wayne wheels out an array of timpani, inundating the group’s earthy excursions with a Wagnerian excess.
The knots are best untangled by watching BCNR’s live show, which feels almost like watching a great behind-the-scenes documentary. Granular countermelodies buried in the mix emerge as if under a microscope: the salsa rhythm Kershaw stirs into the climax of “Two Horses,” the tenderly plucked violin holding hands with the guitar in the intro of “For the Cold Country,” the sun-speckled vocal round that plays out “Goodbye.” The biggest glow-up is reserved for “Nancy Tries to Take the Night,” whose maelstrom of slicing polyrhythms sounds like it’s been let off of a leash live.
Elsewhere, it remains to be seen whether the band will ever stop tinkering with these songs. The finale of “Salem Sisters” has been tweaked to flow seamlessly into “The Big Spin,” while the setlist’s sole song predating the new album, Bush Hall’s “Turbines,” has been flipped on its head. The propulsive climax, whose swirling melody mirrors the motion of the turbines as the narrator flies up to meet them, now serves as its intro. The result is a somewhat more resigned denouement that allows it to flow more naturally into “For the Cold Country,” which is in many ways a spiritual successor. Another of Kershaw’s, the song similarly ends with its narrator overcoming a crisis of identity by taking flight.
It’s moments like these that make Forever Howlong feel uniquely future-minded among the band’s discography. Releases of the past have been forced to reckon with the band’s lineup changes — first with the dissolution of BCNR precursor Nervous Conditions on their debut, For The First Time, then with Wood’s departure on Live at Bush Hall. Elsewhere, Ants From Up There busied itself with the post-mortem analysis of a codependent relationship. On their latest, the group sounds more ready than ever to take on the change so inherent to their story that it’s baked into their name.
Consider “The Big Spin,” where Kershaw plays a farmer who’s had a hard-knocked go of things. In the verses, she’s trapped by existential anxiety. But she escapes in the chorus, where she invokes the changing seasons to suggest that rebirth isn’t an outlandish fantasy — it’s inevitable. Given how much of BCNR’s history has been defined by reinvention, it seems almost pointless to speculate on what the band’s next crop will bring. But given that I'm writing about an album of magnificent baroque pop songs from a band that once fairly accurately described itself as the “world’s second best Slint tribute act,” I'd say they've earned my interest in whatever far-flung impulse they decide to chase next.
And just how new is this particular road, anyway? Mute Wood’s nervy soliloquies and slowcore-inflected guitar work on Ants From Up There, and you’ll hear the rest of the band weaving together the same sensitive network of melody that Forever Howlong champions. It’s there in the playful way each member pops in and out of “Chaos Space Marine,” and it’s there in the way the violin wrings so much pathos out of the flute in “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade” that it sounds like Wood’s world is ending. The instrumentalists’ doctrine of playing lead and support at the same time has always been an integral part of the band’s power.
Then there’s the writing, where Wood’s spirit can still be heard occasionally walking the halls. These songs are still meta (“here comes the chorus,” sings Hyde on “Socks”), still referential (the “towering flower that’s grown so incredibly high” in “Goodbye” was last seen growing in John Lennon’s garden), still charging into the structural switch-ups that made their debut single “Sunglasses” so scene-defining in 2019. On “Besties” Ellery hypes herself up as “a walking TikTok trend,” a characterization so Wood-ian you have to wonder if it was written with him in mind.
Had Wood stayed on, it’s easy to imagine a future in which he would’ve opened the door to contributions from the rest of the band. There’s simply too much collective creativity here to keep muzzled, and Ants showed that the group’s compositional chops were on the rise. Make no mistake — Forever Howlong is a bold, defiantly twee new chapter, and it’s divided the fanbase accordingly. But the creative instincts that nurtured it have been here all along. As Kershaw puts it on “For the Cold Country,” “All that I lost is still with me.”
They’re the same instincts that summoned me to the Moore Theatre in May. The drummer scrapes upon his banjo, the bassist hammers out a piano solo, and then you find out they’ve been sitting on recorders the whole show. The board’s been scattered, the cast has switched roles. In a moment of winking self-referentiality on “Besties,” Ellery opens the album by asking “do you wanna play Forever Howlong?” as if requesting a game of hide and go seek. Take her up if you dare, but remember, there are no rules.
Black Country, New Road is currently playing a string of festival dates throughout Europe, the next of which will be Sexto Unplugged in Sesto Al Reghena, Italy on July 4. On September 11, they will embark on a tour of the UK and EU. Forever Howlong was released on April 4 on Ninjatune, and remains my favorite album of the year at halftime. Listen at the links below:
I liked the way you described the interactions of the band as the play. It echoes with my first book of summer, David Mitchell's novel, Utopia Avenue. I'll leave it with you when I visit. I think you'll enjoy it.