Black Country, New Road are on a different path now

It’s a bleak, rainy Friday and Black Country, New Road have a conundrum. The sextet are one of the most critically acclaimed bands to emerge from the South London post-punk revival scene; their two studio albums to date have each scored five stars from NME. But it seems like the tide may turn with ‘Besties’, the band’s first official single since 2022, released a day before this interview.

Breezier than their dissonant, experimental oeuvre, this psych-folk cut has been hit with descriptors like “saccharine” and “twee” – and the band are trying to figure out why. Georgia Ellery, writer of ‘Besties’, begins: “I think the beat is really vibey. I actually don’t quite understand.” “I think I know why,” Lewis Evans replies. “People find folk music twee, there’s really folky elements in the instrumentation –”

“– But ‘Pet Sounds’ has got loads of the same sorts of sounds,” Charlie Wayne counters. “It’s also one of the most depressing albums ever made.”

On the surface, ‘Besties’ and its unfailing cheeriness seem at odds from what they were previously best known for: brutal excavations of a breakup narrated by former member Isaac Wood. But a closer listen reveals unreciprocated feelings and the beginnings of gutting disappointment: “I know I want something more / and what about you? / In fact, don’t answer that…”

“I think people have just seen the title of the song and maybe not listened to the lyrics that much,” Evans reasons. “Personally, I find the lyrics quite sad. There’s twee sounds going on, but that doesn’t mean it’s unemotional.”

Today, we’re gathered at the cafe next to The Premises Studio in Haggerston. Violinist Ellery, woodwindsman Evans, drummer Wayne and guitarist Luke Mark are chowing down their lunch. The walls are lined with dozens of signed posters of former clients, including Arctic Monkeys and The Last Dinner Party. BC, NR have now joined the ranks; they recorded their upcoming album ‘Forever Howlong’ at The Premises last January.

‘Forever Howlong’ is the band’s first studio album since Wood’s abrupt departure just days before the release of their last record ‘Ants From Up There’ in 2022. The band did release a live album of new material in the form of ‘Live At Bush Hall’ the following year, but ‘Forever Howlong’ is their first proper comeback. “I definitely felt pressure from it for sure, because just purely statistically, [‘Ants From Up There’] was so well rated,” Evans says. “But once we started writing, I didn’t really feel the pressure because I knew that deep quality was there.”

Enlisting legendary producer James Ford [Blur, Arctic Monkeys] and working in a new studio, BC, NR found they had more room to experiment than before. “We wanted to create something that felt maximalist,” Wayne says. “We didn’t want to limit ourselves by just playing six instruments – we wanted to do whatever felt interesting or fun. James was the perfect guy to facilitate that; he made everything extremely easy and gave voice to every single idea.”

“Cut to the chase and show them a good song. If you can’t do that, I don’t know what we’re doing” – Tyler Hyde

Taking cues from folk rock staples like The Band, along with more contemporary names like Joanna Newsom and Fiona Apple, BC, NR populated ‘Forever Howlong’ with instruments previously unheard in their records. Ellery, whose violin was crushed in a touring accident before recording, incorporated her newfound love of the mandolin; May Kershaw swapped her usual keyboard for a harpsichord; Mark and Wayne opted to learn the recorder.

Throughout the years, BC, NR’s writing process has remained organic. Members present songs to each other without a specific album in concept; the band make music around the lyrics, and the record begins to flourish. This time round, the band adopted a more “measured” approach around each lyricist – Ellery, Kershaw and bassist Tyler Hyde – to give “their best chance of these songs being personal, real and effective”.

This style of writing, Evans says, also “definitely has a pop mentality to it. Just trying to make songs that are catchy and likeable but have a deep-set weirdness about them: that’s my favourite kind of music.” Or, as Hyde puts it to NME in a separate phone call: “Cut to the chase and show them a good song. If you can’t do that, I don’t know what we’re doing.” In fact, Hyde theorises later that perhaps it’s this more musically accessible approach that’s the cause of their conundrum.

“Isaac talked about things in a pretty dark way and it can be much easier to get into things that evoke darkness in us,” she explains. “There are a lot of tongue-in-cheek moments on this album and I can totally see that being off-putting, but there is a lot of darkness within the album as well. It’s easier to be dark than it is to be happy, creatively.”

Many who have heard ‘Besties’ have based their judgements on what the band have lost: namely, the singular voice of Isaac Wood. Black Country, New Road don’t take it personally. “People hate change,” Evans says. “All artists, when they’ve gone through a progression, the fans hate it at the start. There’ll be some people that won’t ever like it, and that’s fine as well – they’ve still got the last two albums.”

But those listeners also have yet to hear everything the band have gained. What sticks out the most on ‘Forever Howlong’, due for release in April, is the level of musical and personal connection BC, NR have attained, where three songwriters and their stories have come together to resonate more than they ever could individually.

It all started when Kershaw casually presented ‘The Big Spin’ to the group. Her writing balances the fantastical with the mundane, featuring monotonous yet disturbing walks (‘Forever Howlong’) and a gloriously climactic kite-flying session (‘For The Cold Country’). ‘The Big Spin’ is no different, using dancing beetroots and a flourishing garden as a metaphor for perseverance and regrowth.

“There’ll be some people that won’t ever like it, and that’s fine as well – they’ve still got the last two albums” – Lewis Evans

Ellery found herself taken with “the easy-goingness of the way May wrote the song. [Mark] was like, fuck it – I’m going to play an acoustic guitar. It had an uplifting quality to it that was interesting to me, so I ran with that.” In turn, that influenced the sunny quality of ‘Besties’, and parallels the delightful Western drama of ‘Two Horses’: “It was the first song I wrote for Black Country, New Road, so not much really went into the story. I was just having fun.”

You might also know Ellery from her other band, the experimental duo Jockstrap; her songwriting with BC, NR feels considerably more naked compared to Jockstrap’s chopped-up, fragmented songs. But when we ask Ellery whether ‘Besties’ and its unrequited queer yearning has any connection to Jockstrap’s ‘What’s It All About?’, she nods: “It’s from the same place. I write autobiographically about the things that give me angst and make me happy and make me feel something. That’s what I feel any artist should set out to do.”

Hyde rounds out the connections with ‘Happy Birthday’, which incorporates a chord sequence similar to the one in ‘Besties’. Her style of writing is inspired by artists like Randy Newman, who’s “very colourful in their approach to melody and song structures but can talk about big, bad, dark things”. She continues that in the gut-wrenching ‘Nancy Tries To Take The Night’ and ‘Salem Sisters’, whose timid narrator feels misunderstood and persecuted at a hypersocial summer barbecue.

“We didn’t want to limit ourselves by just playing six instruments – we wanted to do whatever felt interesting or fun” – Charlie Wayne

It’s ‘Mary’, however, which features one of the most personal and stunning moments on the album – without all the pandemonium that defined their music before. Kershaw, Ellery and Hyde team up in a Roches-esque trio to sing about a girl who’s routinely bullied at school, only to come home and hide the aftermath as best as she can: “She screams in the shower / Lost all her power / Keep face, she’ll leave no trace / Not even in her home.”

Both Ellery and Hyde recall the recording process for ‘Mary’ being particularly emotional; recording with all three in the booth, they nailed it in two takes. “I really wanted to have a song where we all sang on it because that highlights the sisterly bond that we have,” Hyde shares. “The song is about time at an all-girls school, it’s also melodic and emotional support. It just felt so obvious and important for us all to sing together.”

Songs like ‘Mary’ are why the band have no interest in retreading the noisier, more challenging path they took for their last two albums. The power they wield may be subtler, but it’s ultimately more complementary. And, as Wayne points out, “it’s also an impossible bar to match. If the general consensus was that the album’s so emotional that it causes the main singer to leave… you are not going to be able to do that.”

Black Country, New Road’s ‘Besties’ is out now. ‘Forever Howlong’ is out April 4 via Ninja Tune. The band tour the US, UK and Europe in 2025.

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