Midway through their ambitious 2021 debut, For the First Time, Black Country, New Road jokingly called themselves “the world's second-best Slint tribute act.” Between frontman Isaac Wood’s agitated sprechgesang and the group’s queasy, off-center grooves, the self-inflicted burn made sense—and could have applied to a whole wave of nervy, British post-punk upstarts who talked more than they sang and attracted critical adoration around the turn of the decade.
Since then, things changed fast, even by the mercurial currents of UK rock scenes. Fontaines D.C. rose to arena status. Shame pivoted to a more melodic sound. black midi split. But no peer has transformed more dramatically than BC,NR. Wood stopped muttering and started singing, bringing a stately grandiosity to 2022’s Ants From Up There—then departed the group before the album was even released. His bandmates chose to retain the name but not the songbook, sharing vocal duties and hurriedly composing new material in time for summer festival dates that they had thought would be in support of Ants.
If most bands release live albums as a stopgap release (or, less generously, a cash-in), 2023’s Live at Bush Hall was something else: a document of a band reborn. Its songs were jubilant (“Up Song”), tender (“Turbines/Pigs”), democratic—and, in a rare move for a band today, without studio equivalents. In typical fashion, Black Country are already distancing themselves from that era. “I just didn’t want to hang out with those songs anymore,” Tyler Hyde, bassist and one of three vocalists, told Rolling Stone UK.
Now, three years after Wood’s departure, comes the studio debut of this new incarnation. And Slint, frankly, is not one of the first 2,000 reference points that come to mind. Folky and pastoral, with recorder solos and mandolin excursions and proggy journeys-in-song, Forever Howlong is as ambitious as anything this band has done. But the album radiates a deep warmth, a communal spirit that courses through the harmonies and stylistic shifts, one that has sustained this six-piece through years of upheaval and reinvention. This is music with an unabashedly twee heart, overflowing with baroque instrumentation and melody—the very things a sardonic post-punk group might regard with suspicion.
With saxophonist Lewis Evans choosing to step away from the mic, vocal and lyric duties are now shared between three women. Violinist Georgia Ellery, also of Jockstrap fame, has the most expressive voice and buoyant pop hooks. Her “Besties,” which kicks off the album in a burst of technicolor harmonies, seems like a straightforward paean to female friendship before revealing a layer of unrequited queer yearning: “I know I want something more,” the narrator cryptically concedes, complicating the song’s cheery façade. Ellery’s writing is dynamic enough to bridge far-flung centuries together: Who the hell mentions TikTok in a song that opens with a Baroque-sounding harpsichord overture? Similarly, what sort of medieval traveler gets betrayed by a man who looks “just like James Dean,” as does the poor heroine of Ellery’s “Two Horses,” a slow, winding narrative whose violent denouement ought to come with a warning label for equestrian lovers?
Indeed, Forever Howlong displays an affection for the archaic and the medieval that has more in common with mid-aughts indie eccentrics like Joanna Newsom or the Decemberists than the band’s post-Brexit peers. Witness “For the Cold Country,” a six-and-a-half-minute prog-folk epic that’s been morphing and stunning fans on tour for months. With lyrics written and sung by keyboardist May Kershaw, it chronicles a “metal-clad knight” who faces some deep identity crisis, putting down his shield and blade and accepting that his best battles are behind him. Amazingly—with the help of Kershaw’s angelic voice and a gossamer, choral backing—this tale of medieval malaise is rendered without the slightest hint of ironic detachment. Instead, it goes down as the album’s moving centerpiece, matched only by the next track, the Tyler Hyde-led “Nancy Tries to Take the Night,” a bleak, Oliver Twist-inspired tale that rises to a Reich-ian woodwind crescendo.
Friendship is the throughline on Forever Howlong, even when complicated by romantic yearning (“Besties”) or intergenerational disconnect (“Happy Birthday”). The knight of “For the Cold Country” only finds solace in confiding in an unnamed companion. And often, the torment that ripples through the album is social alienation of a particularly adolescent flavor. “Salem Sisters” compares struggling to connect at a summer barbecue to burning at the stake, its morbidly funny conceit enlivened by a kooky piano-pop backing, while “Mary” taps into the angst of a schoolgirl relentlessly bullied by her peers. “Made the fool/That’s life at school/What a way to treat your friend,” Kershaw, Ellery, and Hyde sing in harmony before a recorder solo—one primitive enough to be played by actual schoolchildren—plays them out.
Harmony plays a vibrant role throughout the record, but it feels symbolic that the loneliest lament is the one that brings all three singers together in the vocal booth. Hyde told NME that she “wanted to have a song where we all sang on it because that highlights the sisterly bond that we have.” The band’s history is already tumultuous enough to fill a Behind the Music episode, but these songwriters have continually managed to turn that bond into a treasure, reveling in the creative power of community. On Forever Howlong, Black Country, New Road is a multi-headed beast, more collective than band—one without a clear center of gravity but with an overflowing creative spirit.
