COVER STORY | Black Country, New Road Get Into the Groove

Near the end of that tour in late 2022, Black Country, New Road recorded the material for Live at Bush Hall, a concert film and live album taped on December 15th and 16th in West London and released the following spring. The Bush Hall performance had an escape clause built into it, because the release was billed as a transitional concert LP. “I do think we set ourselves up for a much more forgiving audience,” Tyler says. “The context of a live album makes it much less comparable to things we’d released before, so people were patient. We were less opened up to criticism.” The reception from audiences at those gigs, Lewis remembers, was warm, even though BCNR was playing to its biggest crowds yet. “People came out and watched us play music that they’d never heard before, and music of a different lineup to the albums that they loved dearly.”

Live at Bush Hall, though not a proper, oft-acknowledged part of Black Country, New Road’s continuity, affirmed the band’s relationship to each other. “The best thing that came from that period wasn’t the music, it was quite an emotional feeling we had towards one another,” Tyler says. “I was really heavily in awe of the people around me, both my friends that were in the band and then the patience of the people that had stuck with us. And it felt like they were as much in awe with us as we were in awe with them.” Once the Bush Hall gig was done and the tour was finished, Lewis felt relieved that he and his bandmates could finally write more music and leave that era behind. “We’d never toured anything ever,” he says. “Touring an album of songs like that, where we didn’t get to put in the amount of detail that we would have liked to, for two-and-a-half years did start to feel creatively tiring, because you’re just playing the same tune every night.”

For the first time since forming out of the ashes of Nervous Conditions in 2018, Black Country, New Road got to sit down, on their own terms, and take as long as they needed to work on (and finish) new music. “It was a luxury,” May says, about getting to leave the road and diligently schedule rehearsal sessions for writing and arranging while everyone was living in or traveling through London. “It meant that the final songs that were brought in tied the album together a lot.” “We’d been wanting to do that for a really long time,” Georgia continues. “When it came to making that time, we made that time. It was easy to do because we were really hungry for it.” The band began with “Nancy Tries to Take the Night,” which Charlie says was quickly indicative of their first step into something resembling LP3. They returned to “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me),” a track that could have appeared on Live at Bush Hall had Georgia not been so busy touring for Jockstrap’s I Love You Jennifer B. “There was overlap,” Tyler adds, “which was really nice because, when Bush Hall ended, we had these springboards to go off of. I think it would have been much more daunting had we thought of it like a clean slate or fresh start.” Then came the title: Forever Howlong.

Everything for Forever Howlong is different. Black Country, New Road chose a studio (Angelic), a producer (James Ford) and set their own schedule. The six musicians will, for the first time, tour a new, studio-recorded album right after its release. There won’t be any follow-up interviews about member departures, no interpersonal drama to speculate about online. Six years after releasing “Sunglasses,” the band is getting its first regular album cycle. “It’s a weird feeling, knowing that everything will just happen as it does to basically every other band,” Charlie says. “There’s something slightly strange in it, but also quite cool. It feels a bit unnerving.”

When Ants From Up There came out, Tyler said that Black Country, New Road’s goal was to “become accessible.” And the album did achieve that, arriving far more approachable than the Slint-conjuring For the first time, thanks to their use of traditional song structures on “Chaos Space Machine,” anthemic surges on “Concorde,” the bombast-quelling intimacy of “Bread Song” and the hypnotizing guitar twang from “Basketball Shoes.” I ask Tyler if Forever Howlong has made it there, too. “That’s how I’m talking about this album,” she replies. “Forever Howlong has achieved it, and that’s something that I love about art in general, when as many people as possible can come and experience it and take something away from it.” She doesn’t besmirch music that’s rigid or reactional, though. “I’m all there for experimental, inaccessible music and art and freakish things but, for me, I don’t like sitting amongst it for too long. It makes me feel crazy. I just want people to come to our shows and have a good time, and I want us to be able to sing and play our songs for as long as possible without feeling unwell. So, it’s both to invite more people in but also for us to have a better time in the long run.”

Black Country, New Road in 2025 are more ABBA than krautrock, opting for a chiseled, sum-of-its-parts denseness and intricately melodic interlocking rather than minimal drone jams. While songs like “Socks,” “Forever Howlong” and “Salem Sisters” are ornamental and contrasting high-art sonatas, and there’s a proggy rototom sound in “Happy Birthday,” there’s been a misappropriation of the idea of “accessibility” in modern music discourse—the thought that, to make an album more reachable, you have to dilute its content and form somehow and “reject” the art of depth. “I think you choose what you want to take from the album,” Charlie says. “If it’s not your bag, it’s not your bag. But it’s one of those weird things where, to describe your album as ‘accessible’ is, to some, to deny it something that is unattainable by making it inaccessible to most people, which I think is wrong.”

Where, melodically, Black Country, New Road share a kinship with ABBA, they tried to reach the kind of pocket that The Band often occupied in their music, where everyone in a room is locked into such an impenetrable groove together, no matter the tempo. “There’s no band that sounds as good as them,” Lewis correctly declares. “I’ve tried so hard to find one, but they don’t exist. Little Feat get close, but they’re too tight! The Band sound so good together, but it’s kind of sloppy, but it’s kind of not. It makes you feel something in your stomach. We tried, in as many ways as possible, to sound as good as them—or at least to try and feel like how they would feel while they were playing grooves. We could never sound as good as them.”

On Forever Howlong, BCNR rock at a slower pace on “Mary” and “Two Horses,” scaling back from the tempests that once magnified Wood’s songwriting on “Basketball Shoes” and “Sunglasses” in favor of tight synchronicity, making the detonations in “For the Cold Country” all the more gratifying. “I would have called us slightly lazy in the past, just allowing ourselves to climax before we’ve necessarily earned it,” Tyler says. “That’s one of my least favorite things in music, where you haven’t gone about [climaxing] in a unique or meaningful way.” Ants From Up There is full of tense builds, of course, but those antics masked a more frenetic, loud-just-because explosiveness; Luke says that some of Wood’s songs necessitated big moments, because “there was no way that he could sing those lyrics in that manner” without them, especially a crescendo like “your crippling interest” in “Basketball Shoes.” “It’s much more difficult to build up to things positively in art, generally. It’s much easier to be negative than it is positive,” Tyler adds. “And it’s nice to make music that’s infectious, and a groove is infectious. I don’t want to spread infection of anxiety, I would like to spread the infection of groove.”

Georgia, whose work in Jockstrap (on songs like the discotheque quake of “Greatest Hits” and the gentle glamor of “Glasgow”) exemplifies the academics of electronica she studied at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama eight years ago, testifies that she doesn’t listen to music that has massive climaxes. “Maybe it was something I wanted to hear,” she says. “[While arranging Forever Howlong], we were like, ‘Okay, we’re not gonna do so much of that big, wild, explosive climax of sound.’ I think that a few of us were in agreement that we were okay to shelve that and focus more on vibe and convey emotion in different ways than something like that, which had been, retrospectively, something that defined the sound of the band.” She argues that the approach stems from the time Black Country, New Road has spent on the road since Ants From Up There. “Having to give that much energy—having to do the climax of ‘Turbines/Pigs’ at every show got a bit fatiguing for us,” she continues. “But there are a couple [climaxes] on the album, and I think it feels cool to have it be the reward.”

“It’s withholding more for longer, to make it more satisfying when you do do something like that—only choosing to do it when it’s worth it, I suppose,” Luke gestures. “We’ve had songs that groove before, but in quite a stiff style of grooving.” BCNR are still learning how to “lock in,” and Luke wagers that they’ve only just started trying to reach a cohesiveness like that. “If you can do it, you can then throw it away for an effect,” he adds. “If we do a thing where we’re grooving and we’re already locked in, and then it breaks apart, that’s just another effect that you can use.”

Georgia was trying to write her songs—“Besties,” “Two Horses” and “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)”—with her bandmates in mind, imagining how each of them would take the material and make it their own. But she knew that there would be some bits she’d have to let go of: “You have to be open to anything.” May believes that the dynamic in the writing room is always changing, noting that most of Black Country, New Road have been writing together for almost 10 years. “We’ve been cooking for a while,” she says. “I think I have felt more comfortable in recent years—about not minding so much if my ideas don’t get taken. Maybe knowing that the band members had accepted some of my compositions made me more comfortable with getting other ideas rejected.” She brought in the fragments of six songs, but the band decided “The Big Spin” was the winner. “That was a really nice, easy, carefree process where we’d never really done that before,” Georgia says. “It felt like there was not much of an attachment, and therefore it made things flow quite easily. I liked that easiness, how we just all picked up our instruments, jammed it out and didn’t overcomplicate it.”

Everyone in Black Country, New Road has gotten better at arranging since working with Sergio Maschetzko on Ants From Up There, May says, “learning when to hold back” and work out what serves the original compositions best. Still, the band yearned for a producer with a lot of experience, and someone who could make the vocal-recording process as easy and polished as possible. James Ford, whose recent CV includes Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown and Fontaines D.C.’s Romance, stepped up to the plate and worked 16-hour days for three weeks, though it wasn’t without nerves for BCNR. “It was scary,” Lewis remembers. “It felt like, ‘Are people going to think that we’re just trying to hit the big stuff?’ But, actually, we met him and he was super down to Earth. We got on really well and had a similar sense of humor. He was very chill. And, despite the fact that he’s worked on so much popular stuff, he had a really deep knowledge of music and great references to pull from. He understood all of our references that we were into.”

Though Lewis sings on “Across the Pond Friend” and “The Wrong Trousers” on Live at Bush Hall, he steps away from the microphone on Forever Howlong. It wasn’t his original plan, as he assumed he would bring songs in along with everyone else. “But, after touring extensively and singing for the first time in my life, I just really didn’t enjoy it that much,” he admits. “I found myself lacking confidence in it and ultimately not enjoying the gigs when I was singing—and that would affect the whole gig, and that was the majority of the gigs we did in those two-and-a-half years. I think, as a person, I feel like I can take any criticism about my sax playing, because I know that I’m good and I feel good enough at the saxophone for what I try and do, or the flute. But if I got criticism for my vocals, I didn’t have the confidence in myself and my own abilities to be like, ‘Well, I know better than them!’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, kind of true.’ And that’s not a nice feeling.”

Lewis, whose saxophone can occupy a similar frequency range as female singing in lower registers, figured out that ditching those vocal responsibilities helped nurture the three leads that anchor the record, creating a sonic cohesion. Of course, his swashbuckling performance style is still there, but it never gets in the way. “I was able to not poke through unless there was space for me to do so, or unless the music allowed that,” he says. “I really feel like I’ve been serving the song a lot more on this record than I’ve done before.” That approach grew in necessity as the recording sessions amped up, because it afforded Tyler, May and Georgia a contrast to Wood’s album-long, narrative totality. “When you play on a record where there’s one vocalist, they have much more time and depth to tell their story and to go on the emotional journey that they want to go on,” Lewis continues. “Whereas, if there’s three vocalists, those songs—those three to six minutes—matter more for telling the story that they want to tell. I love silently, in the background, making someone else sound better through something that I’m doing that you can’t tell is there.”

Forever Howlong features an iteration of Black Country, New Road where the women are the band’s voice, à la the Roches (a rampant parallel). And to see that occurring in the aftermath of releasing two albums that not only held such an obvious male perspective, but were lionized online by a male-dominated audience, the changeover feels correct. With Tyler, May and Georgia steering the writing, the band pursued the music more intuitively. For Charlie, he says that it made him a much more creative musician, this time in three different directions. Luke says that the conversations in the studio got more vulnerable and adaptive. “The three voices broaden your personal ability to mold to the requirements of the songwriter,” he says, “because most of the work we’ve all done in music has been as part of this project. Learning to twist what you do to suit what someone wants to achieve and to trust them, I think a byproduct of that is being more considerate of what each other wants musically, trying to fulfill that for one another and trying to help us all get there.”

But that gendered slant in responsibility is not the most interesting part of Forever Howlong. “I think the best bit about it is the fact that there are three principal songwriters with really unique musical perspectives that I think Lewis and I have been able to bounce off of in different ways,” Charlie says. “Playing the drums and trying to find percussive parts that makes sense between Tyler and me, when she brings ideas in, so much of it is not even rhythmic. It’s just a fucking nightmare, trying to find where to put a drum part.” Tyler chimes in, “Or, we just want a Harry Nilsson shuffle beat and Charlie refuses.” Nodding, Charlie confirms his veto: “I think that that’s an extremely fun creative situation to be in.” Tyler reckons the band had big conversations on both sides. “It’s good to challenge one another.”

In Forever Howlong’s earliest stages, Black Country, New Road had songs that, through Tyler’s framing, “didn’t fit together on the same album.” “They became different offshoots and different paths that we could pick to go down,” she elaborates. “We didn’t assume that they’d all make it onto the same album. It seemed crazy at the beginning of the process to imagine them all cohesively existing in one space.” “Nancy” was, as Tyler puts it, a “clueless” recording early in the process. “And I was the one that brought that song in!” she laughs. “It was in two parts, and I really liked one part, which was the chorus—which was played on piano—and guitar, which was the verses. And Lewis wrote a through-part to connect them all. That was quite daunting for me.”

“For the Cold Country,” the greatest turn on Forever Howlong, was hard to learn because of its complicated song structure. “There’s a lot to remember, and it rarely repeats itself in the same way as it did before,” Lewis says. “That felt quite hard to arrange, and didn’t come naturally.” BCNR prefer a song to be 80 to 90-percent finished before they try playing it live. “For the Cold Country” was 70-percent done “while they were away,” as they’d been working on it during their five-day residency at the Cornish Bank in Corwall, where they played three shows and wrote new material in-between sets. They began sound-checking with “For the Cold Country” before their Corwall gigs. “It was a stressful thing to have to do, communicate about potential logistical compositional ideas while you’ve all got in-ear monitors in and you’re on the soundcheck and it sounds kind of shit in there, because there’s so much reverberant, reflective sound, because there’s no crowd in the room,” Lewis adds, admitting that, once he and his bandmates returned to their rehearsal room in London, the track finally flourished.

Georgia and Luke argue that the hardest part of making Forever Howlong was capturing the recorder arrangement in the title track, which they say was the “only tense moment” in the studio. “It sounded pretty bad at various points,” Luke says. “We thought we were gonna have to redo the whole thing.” Since recorders are in a set tuning, the key was semi-tuned too low for May, who had written “Forever Howlong” in A-flat major. To counteract this, she arranged for there to be five recorders, all played in G-major and put down a semitone, and tracked her vocals in A-flat major to a keyboard the band and Ford believed was silent. “We played along, playing the recorders to May [singing] and her also conducting along to her own voice,” Georgia recalls. After, they pitch-shifted the records back into an A-flat major, but the keyboard clicks could be heard in the vocal take and they had to start over.

“Trying to re-sing something that was done in a flowing way was quite tricky,” May says, believing that she also “lost the plot” recording her harpsichord intro in “Besties.” “I find it really hard sometimes to not get fixated on small details—especially within my own performance. It can stop me seeing the bigger picture and that’s really frustrating and unhelpful.” Georgia says that, if someone was out of tune, because everyone was playing a recorder in the same key, you’d have to “rat on your schoolmate.” They couldn’t get away with blaming their mistake on someone else, either, because Ford would just replay their isolated mic take. Luke says it was fun solving problems like that, even when they were running out of time in the studio. “There were moments where May was really stressed out that we weren’t getting it yet,” he explains. “She was like, ‘It’s supposed to be beautiful, not funny!’ And we were like, ‘We know!’ God, and we were worried, because she was like, ‘This is the best song I’ve ever written,’ and I was like, ‘I know it is the best song you’ve ever written. We have to get it right!’ We thought we were not doing ourselves justice.” “Was it all worth it?” May asks. “I think so…”

Near the end of writing Forever Howlong, the band hit its stride, as Tyler, May and Georgia wrote “Happy Birthday,” “The Big Spin” and “Besties” in quick succession, which they’ve lovingly dubbed “The Holy Trinity.” “We could’ve kept writing for months, but we had to go into the studio for a couple weeks to refine everything that we’ve got,” Charlie reflects. “It’s a weird feeling. You can never have too much time, but it will never be enough time.” But it wasn’t all rosy for him. “When [Tyler] was writing ‘Happy Birthday,’ I was, in fairly typical fashion, quite like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what this album really feels like. It’s all sort of ahhh!’”

Tyler interjects: “There’s a cycle with how Charlie thinks, because he said the same thing about Ants From Up There.” “I’m extremely predictable,” Charlie admits, before Lewis speaks up. “As am I, to be fair,” he says. “Early on in the process, I’m like, ‘This is gonna be the best fucking album of all time’ way too soon.” I tell Lewis that he brings confidence into the conversation. “And Charlie brings fear,” Tyler replies, laughing. “Together, they balance one another out.” She had first played “Happy Birthday” for the band on piano during their Corwall residency. A week later, they returned to Angelic Studio in Halse, properly finished it and, for Charlie, the purpose of Forever Howlong finally clicked into place. “It made so much sense to me,” he says. “It put [the album] into context, and it felt like that perfect mix of groovy, poppy, weird, catchy and emotional in all the ways I really enjoy some of our music.”

The success of Ants From Up There was going to shape the expectations around Forever Howlong even if Wood hadn’t quit. NME deemed the album a “future cult classic,” yet the immediate response to the music suggested that the virtuosic band were careening towards Arcade Fire levels of grandeur, as if the songs were made in God’s image. Wood was obviously a major part of Black Country, New Road, and his contributions are both irreplicable and irreplaceable in the eyes of some. But the band isn’t trying to replace him. “That’s never been the point,” Charlie says. “If the band pivoted around him—as it will definitely for some people, because that is just the way they have latched onto the band and that is understandable—we would be significantly worse musicians for trying to recreate something that is no longer there.”

Three years later and, when fans aren’t clamoring for Black Country, New Road to write a “seven-minute polyrhythmic flute-led diss track about Squid,” calling them “Polyphonic Spree for Zoomers,” or ribbing the band’s silly, twee-ish, Juno-core press photos, the band’s most fanatical followers have expressed mistrust in their new direction. “So now that Black Country, New Road has changed vocalists is their music finally listenable?” someone asked on X this month. One user called “Happy Birthday “Berkeley graduate music that lowkey sucks.” Another said their music is “black midi for people whose JPEGMAFIA is Brockhampton.” A fan suggested last week that BCNR should’ve taken a page out of New Order’s book and formed a new group after Wood’s departure. “If Isaac had been the linchpin,” Charlie argues, “then the band would have ended for us. That would have just been it. It’s always been this constantly shifting thing. It’s never settled and I don’t think it will ever settle. This is the place that the band is in now, and it will probably never be in that place again.”

I ask the band if they’ve paid any attention to the noise online since Ants From Up There. “I like to have a little look,” Georgia admits, citing a time when she found a six-page online forum of Warp Records fans dunking on Jockstrap after they signed with the label. “I don’t like to have a little look,” Luke counters, chuckling before stressing that he’s “not that bothered by it.” But BCNR have tried to, as he puts it, “de-personalize” themselves in fan culture. “I think we were nervous and guarded,” he says. “[black midi] covered it with humor and interesting photo shoots that were confusing, and being very oblique in interviews.” (For reference: In July 2022, when interviewing them for Hellfire, Geordie Greep told me that the next black midi album would be an “ode to Janet Jackson” and revealed that he and his bandmates were chasing her down for a feature.) That kind of approach feeds a more intense, humor-driven, “meme-ier” fanbase. Black Country, New Road enthusiasts are, in the band’s eyes, more sincere and emotionally connected, “possibly because of the shape of [their] career” and what happened with Isaac’s exit. Luke sees their fans’ passion as a benefit.

“It’s almost entirely a good thing,” he says. “With black midi, when there’s a lot of talk happening about your band going on hiatus, that probably does suck—having people talk about stuff that’s not just the music you’ve made and critiquing that. We’ve had a little share of that, but it’s more strange than it is bad, to see people talking about your band online.” “It’s really such a bonkers thing, isn’t it?” Georgia reacts. “It’s really odd,” Luke replies, “but I think people talking about music online is awesome, that’s how we’ve built our fanbase. I’m not someone who grew up on RateYourMusic all the time. I later found out that loads of albums I love are really highly rated on there. I think we’ve benefited massively off of that—the work of fanatical music fans spreading our music out to people who aren’t quite as dedicated in finding it for themselves.”

It was the fans that saved Black Country, New Road three years ago, after all. Though the band doesn’t believe that the Bush Hall songs are at all indicative of where they were destined to go on Forever Howlong, they can’t ignore how well it captures a group of people who believe the music BCNR makes is compelling no matter what the genre or lineup is. “The distance between yourself and your fanbase is obviously a very difficult thing to know how to engage with, or how to support it or distance yourself from it,” Charlie says. “But I think that we do have our jobs because there is a considerable group of people who are willing to buy our record and take a chance on us, buy a ticket and go see the show, even though we’re like, ‘I’m so glad you enjoyed that album and the album before that, but we’re never going to play that music again.’ And last year, in May, we finished the third lap of a tour of America off of an album that wasn’t even an album. That’s kind of nuts. I think we are duty bound, at least to some extent, to acknowledge the significance of that and the importance of that.”

Despite having to reconfigure Black Country, New Road after Wood’s departure, the band hasn’t tried to change how they play as individuals. The rhythmic styles may be different but, melodically, Forever Howlong’s song retains the same personality heard all over the first two records. You can feel it immediately in Lewis and Georgia’s duetting on “Besties,” but with him on saxophone and her on vocals, similar to how their instruments once wrapped around each other on For the first time or Ants From Up There. These six musicians are best friends, even if the “BCNR, friends forever” motif became immediately beloved by fans despite unintentionally originating from a bit where the band “pissed themselves in the rehearsal room, replaced Tyler’s lyrics with that idea and found it funny.”

Reviews of Ants From Up There eulogized Black Country, New Road like Joy Division. Instead of quitting, the band reinvented themselves on a record with not one, but three primary songwriters and vocalists, and graduated into a sound that’s both new and classic, pairing vibrating twee and dainty chamber-pop psalms with muscular post-punk and stratified space-rock. I think what BCNR have done on these 11 songs is a courageous, fascinating and necessary thing. The music sits within you but never stands still, even at its most spacious; to quote Tyler in “Happy Birthday”: “Cheer up, child, the world don’t owe you a thing.” Forever Howlong was never going to arrive in the style of Ants From Up There, because the band’s interests drastically changed three years earlier. “We don’t listen to that kind of music anymore,” Lewis says. “And at the time of making the second album, we didn’t listen to the kind of music we listened to for the first album anymore. I always wanted to be sure that we’re never making the same album or never putting out the same thing ever.”

Luke surmises that he and his bandmates have become less corny, that they’re all “a bit more tasteful” now than they were while making For the first time. “What’s different now, five years on?” I ask them. “Well, we’re all millionaires now,” Charlie laughs. Tyler says the aim was always to just “be a musician.” “And this is what we’ve got,” she continues. “I’m far from a millionaire. I need to get on the road soon, but I know that, once I do, my life is music. How the hell did we end up here? How did that get us to this privileged point that we are in now? I think it’s largely down to luck and timing and what people were generally enjoying listening to at the time—that post-punk era that we were fortunate enough to be a part of.”

Forever Howlong arrives like a collection of seasons, generously blended together by songs like “For the Cold Country,” “Nancy,” “Besties” and “Two Horses” yet brilliant as standalone works. And neither of those worlds can represent Black Country, New Road. Actually, it’s likely that no song ever fully represents them, because, by the time Forever Howlong comes out, the band will already be thinking about what their next chapter is going to sound like. Maybe they’ll loosen up in the pocket, or maybe they’ll crash out entirely, but it’ll be on their own terms. “And, for better or for worse,” Lewis adds, “doing that, even if it means that you lose something that was special and you make something really bad, like David Bowie’s Prodigy era, you know that that’s still amazing when that happened. You look back on that, and it’s endearing and charming, because [Bowie] moved on and did so much new shit all the time. I hope that we can do that.”

Forever Howlong is out April 4 via Ninja Tune. Listen to the band’s new single “For the Cold Country” below.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.