Black Country, New Road's reinvention continues

For their sophomore album, 2022’s Ants From Up There, the band jettisoned post-punk’s ironic detachment in favour of the sincere sentimentality of mid-2000s emo. The debut album’s murky cloud of post-industrial unease gave way to alt-folk waltzes, baroque art-pop ballads and free-jazz freakouts, as Wood sang of heartbreak and social isolation with self-lacerating honesty and cinematic melodrama. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece that pushed the boundaries of what rock music could sound like, the 2020s’ answer to classics like Radiohead’s OK Computer and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Black Country, New Road were all set to become the biggest new thing in rock. 

And then, four days before the album dropped, Wood announced that he was leaving the band due to his struggles with mental health. The aforementioned reference to Slint on their first record, meant as a joke, now started to sound a little prophetic. In 1991, ahead of the release of Slint’s genre-defining masterpiece Spiderland, the band’s guitarist and frontman Brian McMahan left the band, also due to mental health reasons, leading to the dissolution of the group. Even as fans and critics raved about Ants From Up There, they wondered if the album would not just be Wood’s swansong, but the band’s as a whole. 

As it turns out, those concerns were overblown. In the years since Wood’s departure, Black Country, New Road has not just survived but re-invented itself, making up for the loss of a talismanic frontman by transforming into a very different band altogether. The first phase of this transformation was captured on 2023’s Live At Bush Hall, a joyous, sunlit live album of brand new songs that harked back to the orchestral-pop indie of the late 2000s. 

The evolution continues apace on their recently released third studio album Forever Howlong. Violinist Georgia Ellery, bassist Tyler Hyde and keyboardist May Kershaw have taken up vocal and songwriting duties, replacing Wood’s anguished male protagonist with a chorus of warm, affectless female voices. They’ve retained the Steve-Reich-ian string-and-woodwind instrumentation and powerful crescendos of their earlier albums, but guitar-rock murk now gives way to bright, uplifting melodies on harpsichord, banjo, bass clarinet, timpani, and recorder. If Slint was the key reference for their first incarnation, this one hews closer to the freak-folk of Joanna Newsom and the lush chamber-pop of Arcade Fire, overflowing with warmth, colour and unabashedly twee emotion. 

Each lead vocalist/songwriter on the album brings their own distinct aesthetic and emotional inner-world to the mix, but these differences complement each other rather than pull the record in different directions. Violinist Georgia Ellery’s contributions are the most exuberant and the most straightforwardly pop. Opening with a jaunty harpsichord before leaning into 2000s indie chamber-pop, album opener Besties is a sprightly, harmony-driven ode to female friendship with a darker undercurrent of queer yearning. The fictional ballad Two Horses spends much of its time shuffling along with gentle, ghostly harmonies—following a lonesome woman travelling some medieval high roads—before unravelling in a devastating, macabre finale. It’s a song at once absurd and utterly sincere, inscribing the new boundaries of the Black Country, New Road sound.

On album highlight For The Cold Country, Kershaw spins a prog-folk epic of medievalist whimsy, where a kite-flying knight grapples with an identity crisis, his armour an allegory for the mental shields we hide behind. Kershaw’s diaphanous voice soars over the baroque instrumentation, evoking the neo-bardism of Joanna Newsom. On the title track, she shifts scenes from middle-ages fantasy to the humdrum everyday, but retains her knack for the elliptically insightful verse. “The last video I watched told me the pH of my gut microbiome was certainly causing my blues," she sings in near-whisper over a minimal, percussion-less mist of accordion and recorder. 

Hyde leans even further into dense theatricality, her songs full of psychosocial drama. Salem Sisters’s carnivalesque piano and stop-start vaudevillian rhythms are Trojan horses for a dark exploration of social anxiety that references the Salem witch trials. The Oliver-Twist inspired Nancy Tries To Take The Night is stark and gloomy, Hyde channelling the spectral splendour of Regina Spektor as she weaves together slice-of-life vignettes of the female experience—abusive relationships, prostitution, abortion—to create a tragic but cathartic tale of depression and suicidal ideation. 

All three vocalists finally come together on Mary, a devastating little ditty about a girl enduring bullying at her all-girls’ school. “She screams in the shower/ Lost all of her power," they sing in the chorus, the loneliness and desolation of the lyrics gently offset by the three voices singing in simple, empathetic harmony. It’s a deeply symbolic choice—as if they’re saying that no matter how dark it gets, sisterhood and solidarity will get you through it.  That’s also, perhaps, the defining theme of the album. If the Wood-helmed version of Black Country, New Road was all about contemporary paranoia, loneliness and hurt, then this new incarnation reminds us of the joys of companionship and community. It's a starkly different vision, but one that’s just as compelling and original. And one that feels absolutely essential in these exceedingly grim times.