Black Country, New Road’s triple threat

‘Has someone left?!” a chirpy waitress asks, as a flicker of fear and distress flashes across the faces of half of Black Country, New Road. Three members of the band — Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery and Luke Mark — have gathered at their regular east London studio to tell us about new album Forever Howlong, but, as they inform the friendly server and acquaintance after ordering teas, the other three — Lewis Evans, May Kershaw and Charlie Wayne — are very much still in the band, as far as they know at least.

Though the affable waitress is blissfully unaware, the question is a thorny and delicate one. In the near-decade that they have been making music together, upheaval has been a constant for these university friends. First, they were buzzy punk band Nervous Conditions, who became firm ones to watch before dissolving in 2018 after their frontman was accused of sexual abuse.

From there, guitarist Isaac Wood stepped up to vocal duties for two rapturously received albums as Black Country, New Road — 2021 debut For the First Time and the following year’s Ants from Up There — making them one of the most exciting new bands in the UK. While the first album defined the thrilling era of sardonic post-punk that swept the UK at the turn of the decade, the follow-up showed a softer and more regal side to the band, leaning further into their chops as classically trained musicians with a love of jazz.

If their foundations as a seven-piece then looked to be settling, they were shaken once again when, a few days before the release of Ants from Up There in early 2022, Wood announced he was leaving the group. His final lyric for the band, on the album’s gargantuan closing track ‘Basketball Shoes’, appeared to neatly sum up his relationship with the spotlight and those who adored him: “Your generous loan to me / Your crippling interest.”

In order to fill touring obligations that summer, the band hurriedly assembled a number of songs written by remaining members for other projects, sharing vocal duties between them, and headed out on the road. Those tracks were immortalised on the live album Live at Bush Hall, and showed the musicians’ ability to evolve and thrive despite constant roadblocks. “Look at what we did together / BC, NR, friends forever!” they chanted in unison on the triumphant chorus of opening track, ‘Up Song’, an ode to their resilience and latest new beginning.

“It sounds like a series of unfortunate events, our whole career!” Tyler Hyde — bassist and one of three songwriters on the new album — says with a laugh when I lay out the band’s untraditional path to their current standing. With Forever Howlong, the sextet seem to have found some much-deserved solid ground, and a platform from which to settle in for a long and distinguished career. “It would be nice to sit with it for a bit, in a dream world,” Hyde says, slightly nervously about the idea. “But who knows.”

When re-emerging with Live at Bush Hall, songs for Black Country, New Road mk. 2 were written and sung by Hyde, keys player May Kershaw and saxophonist Lewis Evans. Forever Howlong also features heavy contributions from Hyde and Kershaw, as well as the first songs for the band written by Georgia Ellery, violinist and member of Mercury-nominated duo Jockstrap. The trio present a united front on the new album, writing songs that are in conversation with each other, all of their own style but subtly connected.

Take Ellery’s ‘Besties’, the album’s opener and first single. The track — a sprightly ode to female friendship anchored around a glittering harpsichord line — took shape in Ellery’s mind after the band had been rehearsing Kershaw’s ‘The Big Spin’, the album’s second track. After hearing ‘Besties’, Hyde then fleshed out her own song, ‘Happy Birthday’, with influences bouncing between the three.

“For so long, it seemed like the songs were really far apart,” Hyde says. “It was only in the last month of writing that everything met in the middle.” 

Ellery adds: “We’ve all got very different lyric-writing styles. It was a bit tough to know how they were going to connect, but it was a bit of a snakes and ladders situation. We were jumping off each other and writing more songs based on the others.”

While this deliberate and patient way of working might seem like par for the course for most groups, for Black Country, New Road, it was a revelation, as Hyde explains: “Bush Hall came about because we had to quickly throw something together. Therefore, they weren’t well-crafted songs compared to what we would want to make. We spent a long time crafting these songs, and they make a lot more sense to me. I think they have a lot more longevity than Bush Hall.”

Bush Hall was a vital and beloved rebirth of the band as a six-piece with multiple vocalists and introduced a style further away from their post-punk beginnings and towards brighter and more theatrical ideas. This vibe is furthered on Forever Howlong, and positions Bush Hall as a necessary stepping stone, even if it’s one the band are keen to move past (Hyde: “I just didn’t want to hang out with those songs anymore. They ick me out!”)

The key to longevity for the songs on Forever Howlong, the band say, is the meticulous process of crafting and fine-tuning these 11 tracks over a number of years. As with Bush Hall, the songs take sonic inspiration from the kaleidoscopic songwriting of Joanna Newsom and often recall 00s indie staples Arcade Fire and The Decemberists, while also sounding like nothing else out there. “I think it’s a silly word, but it’s a big album,” Hyde says. “It just really hits you in the face. It’s a real journey, and you can hear how much of a journey we were on. It’s a bit of a novel.”

Some of this novel’s most arresting chapters come in its back half, with Kershaw’s ‘For the Cold Country’ and Hyde’s ‘Nancy Tries to Take the Night’ — both six-minute-plus triumphs that are intense but brilliantly bright. The songwriting remains as dazzling as on Bush Hall, but the carefully honed and expertly performed arrangements take the album above and beyond.

While each Black Country, New Road album so far has ended with an almighty bang on extended and thunderous closing tracks, Hyde wanted the finale of Forever Howlong — the languid and gentle ‘Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)’ — to “not be dramatic, to be a positive song. A rom-com credits song!” As is natural for them to crave, Forever Howlong sees the band favouring lightness over the dark intensity that defined their earliest work. The whole thing is infused with a sense of optimism and hard-earned freedom.

To execute the vision of the album, the band recruited the legendary James Ford, most known for his ongoing work in helping turn Arctic Monkeys into the biggest British band of a generation. Ford was a last-minute choice after plans with another producer fell through, and guitarist Luke Mark says he and his bandmates were “a bit wary about working with someone who has such a reputation”.

He adds: “When you think of the music that he’s worked around, it brings a certain sound to mind. We were trying to avoid a producer’s sheen. Even though it’s the first album we’ve done where we didn’t just play everything live, we wanted it to sound raw and unsanitised and woody. We were a bit wary [of working with Ford], but it turns out that he can do whatever he wants.”

Hyde concurs: “It was really nice to work with a musician. He brought very organic instruments and is just a music nerd. That was the best part of working with him — all the gadgets and toys. We’re a bunch of kids that can get carried away with our opinions, and he was the perfect mediator.”

Against the backdrop of Wood’s departure, the latest iteration of Black Country, New Road has mutual care among the six members as a core principle. Wood’s statement upon leaving the band said he was feeling “the kind of sad and afraid feeling that makes it hard to play guitar and sing at the same time”, with a tour of the UK and Ireland cancelled a few months before the departure was confirmed.

The agreement on tour from then on, Mark explains, was that there would be “enough songs from each person that if anyone needed to take a night off from having to be the frontperson for a few songs, they could just say, ‘I don’t want to sing tonight,’ and everyone else could pick it up.”

Saxophonist Evans, who sings the songs ‘The Wrong Trousers’ and ‘Across the Pond Friend’ on Live at Bush Hall, was the first to call in the favour. “He would get so much more nervous before the beginning of gigs, and as soon as he decided to stick to playing instruments, he was so much happier,” Hyde explains, with Evans not contributing songs or lead vocals to Forever Howlong.

At gigs, Hyde has become the de facto frontperson for the band, though they all constantly reiterate that it is a truly democratic operation between the six members. At gigs, this is shown visually, with the band lining up in a horseshoe formation on stage with no focal point. “There was a hole and a space, a lack of communication,” Hyde says. “That existed even when we had our last frontman though — he wouldn’t communicate. At gigs, I like to have someone acknowledging that I’m there watching them, and to say hello and thank you. It also felt weird though, because we’re very much a band and equally important. I got conscious that it seemed like I was trying to steal a limelight or bring focus onto me.”

Mark responds to his bandmate: “You’re good at it — you’re very tasteful. I’m put off by certain ways of speaking to the crowd. If it ever has this slick, presenter aspect to it, I find it quite jarring.”

Hard as it is to believe, across their eight years as a band, Black Country, New Road have never traditionally toured an album of songs already available to the public, always finding themselves — by choice or not — one step ahead and premiering new music. Though they will never be a ‘normal’ band, such is their unique style of playing and extraordinary musicianship, the idea of doing things a little more traditionally is exciting for the still-young group on this next run of worldwide dates across 2025.

“It’s hard to always be anxiously presenting new things to people and hoping they like it,” Mark says, with Ellery adding: “It’s tough playing to people who don’t know the songs — we’ve never experienced people singing back our lyrics. It happens really quickly when the album’s out, and playing is a dream when they’re on your side. But it feels like we’re always there in our first interview every time.”

“It’s like doing standup,” Mark chuckles. “And nobody’s laughing.”

While all three songwriters show their unique and expert strengths across Forever Howlong, most stunning is when they come together on ‘Mary’. Over delicately plucked acoustic guitar from Mark, the trio harmonise together gorgeously on a song that’s another symbolic show of strength from a band who have had the kitchen sink thrown at them, always finding themselves able to stand up and continue evolving.

Hyde reflects: “Everything has started again and again and again for reasons out of our control. Maybe it’s so programmed into us now that we have no other way of being, even if nothing bad happens again.”

“It’s like [our career] is being written as a mini-series,” Mark adds, “and every episode needs to have a cliffhanger, so they just throw something in.”

“It’s Lost!” Ellery laughs. “We’re Lost: The Band!”

With the hard-earned stasis and stability of this new era of the band, they’re exiting the simulation with their most confident and supreme material yet. On ‘Socks’, a divine highlight of the album, Hyde says it best: “In dark there comes the light / And we must try with all our might to keep this thing alive.”

Taken from the April/May issue of Rolling Stone UK, out now. Order your copy here.