Black Country, New Road Watch Their Past Detonate on the Stunning, Gentle Forever Howlong

The Cambridge band’s third album rotates among three distinct lead vocalists: Tyler Hyde, May Kershaw, and Georgia Ellery. Each musician brings a separate aesthetic, vocabulary, and emotional compass to the material, allowing every track to fully inhabit its writer’s idiosyncrasies.

By Casey Epstein-Gross | April 8, 2025 | 9:30am

Music Reviews Black Country, New Road

Black Country, New Road Watch Their Past Detonate on the Stunning, Gentle Forever Howlong

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By the time Black Country, New Road released Ants From Up There in early 2022, they had built a mythology around themselves: art-school multi-instrumentalist wunderkinds, with songs as long and winding as the queue outside a Brixton pub at closing time. From their earliest days—emerging from the Windmill scene alongside black midi and Squid—they defied categorization, dabbling in klezmer, post-rock, math-rock, chamber pop, and spiritual dirges all at once. Their debut release, For the first time was a pointed, jagged arrival, and its follow-up, Ants From Up There, was an elegiac masterpiece that saw frontman Isaac Wood spiral gloriously inward. Both projects were met with acclaim near and far. Filled with minor epics, indie-rock fever dreams soaked in violin screeches, saxophone yawps, and Wood’s unmistakable voice—one part whisper, one part howl, all parts wounded boy genius—BCNR found themselves suddenly hailed as the new face of… Well, whatever genre they were inhabiting.

But four days before that album dropped, Wood departed the band.

It would have been easy for Black Country, New Road to simply vanish after Ants From Up There. That album was their OK Computer moment: grandiose, all-consuming, inimitable—and their Thom Yorke unceremoniously (albeit amicably) left for good, just 96 hours before the record’s release, citing mental health reasons as the cause. Suddenly, the six remaining members found themselves fielding an entirely new press cycle, one surrounding not their latest release but their impending future. And the question on everyone’s lips wasn’t just one of ability (“Can BCNR possibly continue without Wood?”) but merit (“Should they even try?”), too.

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Yet instead of burning out or fading away, BCNR doubled down. They didn’t just keep going; they did something infinitely braver: They pivoted entirely, with a new lineup of lead vocalists (violinist Georgia Ellery (of Jockstrap fame), bassist Tyler Hyde, and keyboardist May Kershaw) and no clear singular protagonist at the center. They abandoned their most marketable asset (singular anguish-as-epic) in favor of something warmer, fuzzier, and—brace for impact—kind of twee.

The group’s next move—the live record Live at Bush Hall—was a patchwork quilt of voices and styles, folkier, lighter, yet still yearning and richly strange. But it was a live album, intentionally ephemeral. With Forever Howlong, Black Country, New Road’s third studio album and first proper release without Wood, the band have chosen permanence again, complete with studio polish, cohesive sequencing, and new songs that assert, unmistakably, that this is a real album and not just an epilogue or an attempt at reclaiming something lost.

Forever Howlong is a record of uncanny restraint and quiet daring. It doesn’t attempt to replicate the bombast of its predecessor, nor does it posture as a bold new era through flash or artifice. Instead, it chooses something riskier: sincerity, softness, and specificity. It is both a breakthrough and a breakdown—of expectations, of sound, of ego. After the thunderous grief of Ants From Up There, the band’s sound has folded inward, towards a gentler, stranger terrain. Where once they split open with ecstatic crescendo, now they drift. They withhold, they simmer. This is the sound of a band that has no interest in making a grand, ostentatious comeback. They’ve already done the mythic collapse. This is the careful reassembly—all the same parts (minus one) simply rearranged into something that feels entirely new while still retaining the beating heart of everything that came before.

The most obvious structural change on Forever Howlong is the move from singular to plural. Where Wood’s voice once unified BCNR’s output—his tremulous delivery shaping both their content and contour—this album rotates among those three distinct lead vocalists: Hyde, Kershaw, and Ellery. Each brings a separate aesthetic, vocabulary, and emotional compass. And rather than smoothing those differences over, Forever Howlong leans into them, allowing each track to fully inhabit its writer’s idiosyncrasies. While this does lead to an album that doesn’t quite manage to land a convincing singular vision, that feeling is also kind of the point.

Kershaw’s contributions are perhaps the most quietly profound. The metaphor-ridden “The Big Spin” and the expansive journey of “For the Cold Country” represent some of the album’s most abstract and allegorical material. She writes in loose metaphors and elliptical verse—knights crawling into caves, kites burning in trees, conversations between heads and roots. Her voice, misty and earnest, floats over baroque instrumentation like a half-remembered spell. The six-and-a-half-minute epic “For the Cold Country” is a journey in and of itself: It opens with choral harmonies, a violin line that could’ve wandered in from a renaissance fair, and a positively medieval narrative, but it builds into a peak as intense as it is recognizable. In that long-awaited climax, when the percussion crashes in and Kershaw pleads, “Are you there? Can you see me? Are you listening? Won’t you stay now?,” the illusion of pure fantasy collapses, and we find ourselves suddenly in the realm of the devastatingly real. It’s one of the few true emotional eruptions on the record, and it hits precisely because it takes so long to arrive.

This more mythic, symbolic element of Kershaw’s writing is what makes her lyricism in the titular track such a standout: It’s unbearably mundane, a song about boiling beans, over-steeping tea, and making eye contact with a dog during a man’s awkward poo pickup. The production is gauzy, the melody more suggestion than structure, but the lyrics cut through, even as Kershaw’s foggy voice drifts across a soft haze of accordion and recorder: “The last video I watched told me the pH of my gut microbiome was certainly causing my blues.” It’s a moment of disarming banality elevated to an almost hymnal level of grandeur by the minimalist execution of the track; purposefully devoid of melody, the song sonically embodies the constant 2025 feeling of relentless, aimless brain fog.

(That being said, for all the form-mirroring-content beauty of it, I do wonder if the decision to couch this song in particular in such heavy gauziness isn’t something of a missed opportunity—much of this album lives in the realm of the conceptual, emotional, and mythical, making “Forever Howlong” a lyrical standout in its frank discussion of day-to-day life. Except its lyrics fade into the haze of it all, lost a little in its hypnotizing experimentation—and while the thought behind doing so does make sense, I can’t help but feel like the smothering of Kershaw’s excellent, odd, stark lyricism here into the familiar hazy realm of smooth abstraction adds up to a net loss).

Hyde’s songs are often the densest and most theatrical, dealing in extremes of despair, grandeur, and twisted whimsy. “Salem Sisters” blurs the lines between party-hosted paranoia and Arthur Miller-style persecution (I mean, who among us hasn’t felt dangerously out of place at a summer BBQ?), opening with a percussive piano line before erupting into a swirl of saxophone, timpani, and electric guitar that perfectly underscores the eeriness of Hyde’s tale. “Socks,” one of the album’s longest and most intricate tracks, oscillates between confessional musings and swelling instrumental grandeur, culminating in something that feels like a lush yet secular psalm. “In joke there comes the truth / I am not blinded by my youth,” Hyde sings, calling to mind Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple, and Joanna Newsom (the latter two being frequently cited inspirations for the record). It’s one of the album’s most compelling musical arrangements, an immediate sonic standout.

However, the lyricism does occasionally err on the side of the abstract a tad too much, the specificity and imagistic grounding of Hyde’s other tracks somewhat absent—and as a result, a few lines come across as a little cliche (“Our life holds a light no life has held before,” “All things must pass,” “In dark there comes the light,” and so on), with any attempted elaboration on or subversion of these motivational truisms never quite landing. Both the first and final verses, though, are excellent. And elsewhere, like on “Happy Birthday,” these slightly more generic observations manage to land in a way they don’t on “Socks,” with the song’s final couplet of “How do you make it down the street? / Feel removed from everyone you meet” hitting like a freight train, despite the commonality of this sentiment in our modern, post-Covid world. (Semi-related, but necessary: shout out to Luke Mark’s excellent electric guitar work on both “Happy Birthday” and “Salem Sisters”; it’s rare throughout the album, but when it comes in, like in this track, it absolutely destroys).

At her best though, Hyde’s lyrics are often raw, even confrontational—“You run through the streets like the whore that you are / And you hope pretty soon you’ll be struck by the car,” she spits on the standout track “Nancy Tries to Take the Night”—but she manages to temper that bite with a remarkable sense of melodic play, à la Neko Case’s “Curse of the I-5 Corridor.” “Nancy” is the album’s darkest point, its most direct confrontation with depression and suicidal ideation (via a quilt of lived female experiences seemingly ranging from abusive relationships to prostitution to abortion, woven together in a single track inspired by the tragic Oliver Twist character of the same name). It’s a gut punch, made all the more powerful by the swirling instrumentation surrounding it—Lewis Evans’ brilliant saxophone duet with Kershaw’s piano line perfectly buoys the growing sense of dread Hyde creates, and the late arrival of Charlie Wayne’s enormous, jubilant drums makes the climax feel almost inevitable. But it’s not all bleak. The song finds a strange solace in its honesty, a catharsis in its refusal to look away.

Ellery, on the other hand, seems to be somewhat more of a minimalist, at least with opener “Besties” and closer “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me),” although it is worth noting that the latter feels like one of the weaker songs on the record; pretty, yet less memorable than Ellery’s other outings. “Besties,” on the other hand, was immediately the most polarizing single the band has ever put out—it’s an instant earworm, which is something that turned longtime Wood fans off at the get-go, arguably before they gave the track the chance it deserves. On the surface, “Besties” sounds like a chamber-pop number trapped in a cheerful snow globe: twinkling harpsichord, “ahhhs” that wouldn’t be out of place on Pet Sounds, brushed drums, mandolin flourishes, and Ellery’s smooth, almost affectless delivery. But peel it back and there’s that ache again, the kind that Black Country, New Road has always harbored, even in their most euphoric moments. “Yeah, I know what’s expected of me / Besties night and day,” she sings, her voice still calm, almost playful—but it’s emotional misdirection more than anything else, the equivalent of forcing a tight grin as you shove everything else down.

“Besties” is not simply a light-hearted tune about friendship, it’s a burning desire to go beyond the label found in the song’s title made manifest; a queer yearning anthem disguised as a quirky sleepover jam, an ode to longing tucked behind the Instagram caption of a friendship selfie. The discourse surrounding the song seems a bit representative of that surrounding Forever Howlong at-large, as well: upbeat, harmonic, melodic, and twee qualities do not necessarily equate to “happy” songs. There are more nuances to angst than Wood’s brooding and anguish (although he was, of course, remarkably skilled at his execution of both), and those subtle shades are precisely what this record deals in.

What’s remarkable about Forever Howlong isn’t just its new textures—though they’re everywhere, from recorders to mandolins to banjos—but how intentional it all feels. The band’s commitment to groove, subtlety, and restraint feels almost rebellious after the explosive crescendos of their earlier work. Ellery’s “Two Horses,” the record’s third standout epic (alongside “For the Cold Country” and “Nancy”), might be the best example of this: A mythic, narrative-driven ballad that reads like a Western fever dream, it’s cinematic without being overblown, gorgeously haunting without pushing too hard. A wandering woman meets a James Dean doppelgänger in a bar, only to watch him murder her horses in the night. It’s a bizarre fiction delivered with utter sincerity, myth-making made intimate. The structure alone is operatic—three acts, rising action, climactic turn, quiet devastation—but the instrumentation keeps it grounded: lilting mandolin, soft harmonies, ghostly oohs, and eventually, Wayne’s phenomenal drumline, which grants the song the adrenaline it needs to hurtle towards its peak.

The vocal talents of all three women—which are immeasurable on their own and genuinely brain-breaking put together—are finally allowed to merge on “Mary,” a simple but devastating portrait of a girl enduring isolation, bullying, and silent despair at her all-girls’ school. The lyrics are almost childlike in their bluntness—“She screams in the shower / Lost all of her power”—but the arrangement does the heavy lifting, set to the tune of Mark’s fragile, finger-picked acoustics. All three women sing together in unison, their harmonies blending like they’ve known each other since childhood. There’s no bombast, no climax—just empathy.

“Mary” is also a harbinger: When I say that the band’s women take the reins, I don’t only mean vocally, but thematically, sonically, spiritually. The band has been upfront about this becoming an intentional aspect of the album, even if it initially arose out of necessity, what with Evans’ decision to remove himself from the running for vocalist; as Ellery puts it, Forever Howlong is “definitely very different to Ants…because of the female perspective, and the music we’ve made compliments that.” (The cynic—and woman—in me tends to think that at least some of the online misogyny surrounding the record stems from this difference, particularly because this subtext is sometimes made text—like in this post insisting “there’s nothing left” for most fans after Wood’s departure because all the new music is just “fun lesbian songs,” and the vitriol evident in the tone is hard not to find humor in. Best of all, though, is a Youtube comment Wayne himself reposted on X, with acclaimed critic @kleins-v7v complaining that “estrogen and woke undertones” have ruined the band. I say there’s not enough estrogen and woke undertones! Give us more!)

Although it isn’t always consistent and is evidently a representation still the band finding their footing in many ways, Forever Howlong is undeniably special, and not just because it manages to differentiate itself from the excellent work Black Country, New Road had released before, or even because it demonstrates the genuinely jaw-dropping versatility of these six individuals (to be fair, they each play two instruments minimum, so that part shouldn’t come as a surprise). If Ants From Up There was the sound of collapse rendered grand, Forever Howlong is the slow act of rebuilding, brick by careful brick, in the voices of people long relegated to harmony lines. And for once, the harmonies get the mic. For a band who were once defined by how intensely they hurt, Forever Howlong proves there’s something equally profound in choosing to keep going—softly, carefully, together. To keep on playing together forever, however long that forever might be.

Read: “Black Country, New Road Get Into the Groove”

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].