The band has always been fundamentally collaborative. Members would come up with ideas in pods and report back to the group, one where an entire seven-piece band could improvise and write an entire verse-chorus-verse song on stage and put it on their album almost verbatim. But on 2022's Ants From Up There, Black Country, New Road’s previous album and instant chamber-rock classic, Wood defined the feeling of the band’s entire sound: intense in both its silence and its massive crescendos, marked by Wood’s anxious talk-singing through heart-rending abstract poetry. Nothing sounded quite like Black Country, New Road
And nothing sounds quite like this album either, but for an entirely different reason: instead of one frontman harnessing the energy of a talented sixpiece, for the first time, the diversity of the band’s talent is fully on display, not just as instrumentalists but writers, as curators of a full package.
Forever Howlong is largely written by a group of three people, and by three women. That change towards a group-led direction comes with its own set of challenges: this is easily Black Country, New Road’s least cohesive album yet. While threaded together by femininity and love (between kinda-maybe-just friends, or between a person and a feeling, or between a traveller and a man who exploits her, or just between two lovers), it still somewhat lacks a clear throughline in more ways than one. The lyricism varies from blunt character portraits and slice-of-life vignettes to political commentary and extended metaphors. While every track stands magnificently on its own, some get buried in the wider perspective of the album.
Nevertheless, none of anything on this album is quite like
anything else, and absolutely none of it is anything like Wood’s cryptic
melancholia. The decision to pivot was a risk – as borne out by online
mixed responses to the group’s newly melodic and female-led sound – but a
risk absolutely worth taking. As great as Black Country, New Road’s output was before
this, they succeed most on Forever Howlong when they stray
furthest from their comfort zone and indulge some of their most creative
and exciting ideas yet. It’d be hard to imagine the band even a few
years ago making songs like the title track, whose main backing track is
a chorus of recorders, or the folksy, progressive country-inspired “Two
Horses”, but they work exquisitely.
The breathtaking writing and vocal contributions on Forever Howlong
are handled by women like bassist Tyler Hyde, who handles many of the
album’s most political and feminist tracks in addition to one ode to a
long-term relationship; violinist Georgia Ellery, whose tracks bookend
the album with beautifully detailed, clear character vignettes about the
complexities of womanhood and love; and keyboardist May Kershaw, whose
writing centers on the minute details of life as indicators of
everything from blinding joy to numbing sadness. Black Country, New Road has always been
egalitarian, collaborative, and universally talented – “friends forever”
– and still, it’s stunning how well their three styles work with each
other on this project. After all, my three favorite tracks on this album
are all written, one each, by the album’s three main songwriters:
Ellery’s aforementioned “Two Horses”, a metaphoric, vaguely Western
piece that plays out like a cynical inversion of the Parable of the Good
Samaritan; Kershaw’s “From The Cold Country”, a towering and mythical
ode to love through peace and chaos (and featuring an absolutely
breathtaking breakdown in the song’s final moments that I’d be remiss to
not mention); and Hyde’s “Nancy Tries to Take The Night”, a
heart-rending second-person narration about forcing oneself into the
mold of female social respectability.
It’s difficult to discuss this album outside the context of
Wood’s departure, but I believe that understanding it solely through
the lens of Black Country, New Road’s past work does the album a disservice. After all,
for a band marked by overflowing creativity and constant creative
pivots, this is hardly their biggest change in sound. And it’s still
distinctly a Black Country, New Road album: see the way these tracks build and fall apart
and build back up, the saxophone and keyboard lines floating throughout,
the arpeggiated chamber pop melodies. This album, as different as it is
from the band’s other output, is simultaneously the most distinct Black Country, New Road
has ever been.
That’s especially remarkable given the range of voices and perspectives represented across Forever Howlong:
from euphoria to exhaustion, from puppy love to forever, from the
universal to the insignificant. But it’s true nonetheless. This might be
the most disjointed Black Country, New Road album yet, but even for this strong-willed
group of composers, Forever Howlong also has a solid vision for
the future. It’s a group of friends, writing about and sharing life
through all its powers and mundanities alike, creating some of the best
music in recent rock history with no signs of stopping.
More than any specific motifs or emotions, both of which Forever Howlong
have in spades, this album’s strongest theme to me was the feeling of
the slow, steady feeling of transcending depression: of moving towards
living a life that is merely normal instead of damped, where
highs and lows finally exist in equal quantities, where the lows are
manageable even if persistent and the highs are exceptionally,
effortlessly high. Black Country, New Road formerly explored the narrow gamut ranging from
jittery sexual anxiety to the slow dissolution of romance, but
everything about the band has expanded outward since then: they’ve never
sounded this full before.
By the album’s final track, when Georgia Ellery sings
tenderly that she’s “fallen in love with a feeling,” it’s hard to
pinpoint exactly what feeling she could be talking about, but at the end
of this journey of an album, as instruments and choral vocals reach the
sky, you feel it in your bones – that feeling is the joy and pain of
living: living as a woman, a lover, a friend, a soul. On Forever Howlong,
Black Country, New Road hasn’t exactly grown up – they were a perfectly grown-up band
before this – but they’ve transitioned, found a few new friends, and
lived a few more lives. The result is an album that’s messy, incohesive,
and purely, beautifully human.
