When the band released their debut album, ‘For The First Time’, in 2021, they were a loud and punchy post-rock outfit that wore their Slint influence like a high-vis vest, thought they still found time to quiet things down a bit on songs like ‘Track X’, and while ‘Ants From Up There’ did expand their sound, moving the band into the throes of art rock and chamber pop, the band that recorded those songs still feels quite far-removed from the group that has just released ‘Forever Howlong’.
‘Forever Howlong’ is Black Country, New Road’s third album, their first studio release since 2022, and the second release from this new iteration of the band following the 2023 live album and concert film ‘Live at Bush Hall’. This album takes the chamber music-touches of 'Ants' and expands them into a full on progressive-folk-baroque-pop-
With Isaac Wood out of the picture, vocal duties have been picked up by the three women in the band, multi-instrumentalist Georgia Ellery, keys player May Kershaw, and bassist Tyler Hyde. The three also wrote all of the lyrics on the album, with the exception of ‘Salem Sisters’, which features contributions from drummer Charlie Wayne and Hyde’s partner Richard Fakhre, a.k.a Skydaddy. While the lyrics on Forever Howlong deal with topics like friendship (‘Besties’), class disparity (‘Happy Birthday’), emotional manipulation (‘Two Horses’) and childhood bullying (‘Mary’), the most interesting aspect of the songwriting on the album is the disparity between the often surreal lyrics with the more sobering moments on the album, as well the music itself.
On early album highlight ‘The Big Spin’, the song opens with the lines “We chopped off your arms / chopped off your beautiful purple hair”. Not only do these two lines clash with each other in their differing levels of shock and violence, the music also clashes, with its upbeat piano and strings, its brass flourishes and a lovely theatrical vocal delivery from Kershaw. There are plenty of other moments like this throughout the album, like the lines “One of these days you might notice the patch on my head / I’m already dead” on Happy Birthday, or “I shall boil my beans / I should get my vitamin B” on the title track following the heartbreaking lines “I am back home now / I move my fingers on the piano keys / And I am back to thinking whether she’s sobbing in the men’s room again”.
The musical centrepiece on ‘Forever Howlong’, however, is undoubtedly its third and final single, ‘For The Cold Country’. Opening with beautiful and layered vocal flourishes before moving into a simple combination of acoustic instrumentation with May Kershaw’s angelic vocals, building over time with more and more instrumental additions, ebbing and flowing between slow melancholy and leaping vocal triplets. The second half of the song continues to build before exploding into an apocalyptic delirium, closing with a return of the vocal flourishes that opened the track. ‘For The Cold Country’ is a musical journey, a blown-out fairytale that takes place both in the times of dashing knights and in the modern day, a beautiful and moving addition to the group’s catalogue.
Black Country, New Road may not be the same band that they used to be, but on ‘Forever Howlong’ they prove that’s not a bad thing by any stretch, and that they still carry that musically creative heart that made them so compelling in the first place.
