It’s a blustery Friday afternoon outside on the streets of Hackney, but in the belly of storied recording studio The Premises, Black Country, New Road are giving us a spirited tour of the famous faces that have frequented the building.
Down in the basement lock-up, cages are filled with cases attributed to Laura Marling and Jarvis Cocker; one time, explains guitarist Luke Mark, they saw Charli xcx’s name written on the studio board. “We opened the door and there was just an open laptop in the middle of an empty room,” he remembers, forlornly. If nothing else, however, quite a fitting metaphor for the reigning queen of online culture.
As the six members pack up their gear from an afternoon rehearsal ahead of the release of this month’s ecstatically-received third studio album Forever Howlong — also recorded within these walls — talk rattles between their various commutes (“This place is mildly inconvenient for everyone, and that’s democracy”) and the unexpectedly rich selection of plastic instruments you can purchase from a wildlife gift shop. Considering that, for their inaugural two records — 2021’s Mercury Prize-nominated For the First Time and the following year’s Ants from Up There — Black Country, New Road were regarded as serious musos at the forefront of the new south London alternative scene, it’s all a far cry from the existential wranglings that made their name.
In the three years since that last record, however, an awful lot has changed for the group. A few days before the release of Ants from Up There, then-frontman Isaac Wood quit the band citing overwhelming mental health difficulties. “I have bad news which is that I have been feeling sad and afraid too. And I have tried to make this not true but it is the kind of sad and afraid feeling that makes it hard to play guitar and sing at the same time,” he said in a post on the band’s Instagram page.
“Do you want to end the band or do you want to go play these next gigs?”
Faced with the decision, as singer and bassist Tyler Hyde summarises, of, “Do you want to end the band or do you want to go play these next gigs?”, the remaining members hurriedly wrote a whole new set of material to enable them to fulfil their forthcoming touring duties, with a combination of Hyde, flute and saxophonist Lewis Evans and keyboard player May Kershaw sharing vocal duties. On Forever Howlong, the three women in the band — Hyde, Kershaw and violinist Georgia Ellery, who also plays in Mercury-nominated outfit Jockstrap — take the mic.
The decision to spread the load has been an intentional one, made in the wake of seeing Wood’s struggles. “There’s this thing that you can’t undo when you have a band where, as much as you want to look like a collective, when you’ve got a singer there is a spotlight on them,” says Hyde. “And as much as people thought that Black Country was all equal, there was this weight on the singer, so we wanted to share the experience and have it feel less pressured.
“If you have multiple singers and someone’s having a bad time, then they can stop,” she continues. “Now, we have nearly enough music where, if I don’t feel good that day, it’s okay. May and Georgia can just sing the songs that they sing. If I’m ill, I don’t have to worry about it.”
Huge stars including Chappell Roan have recently been spotlighting the lack of structure in the music industry to support artists’ health and wellbeing. For Black Country, New Road, that awareness has led them to take matters into their own hands. “The people we work with are all reliant on us continuing to perform for their livelihood. There’s no fallback in the music industry. If we don’t perform, not only do the rest of the band miss out on work but loads of other people miss out on work,” says Mark. “So the self-preservation approach we have of trying to make sure the others are okay is for ourselves, but also the knock-on effect is that we need to feel good to keep performing because we’ve promised it in a contract.”
“Where were all the ladies at?! Quiet in the back. That’s kind of what it felt like”
Alongside the practical necessities of their new incarnation, Forever Howlong marks a huge and undeniable shift in sound because of the voices at the centre of it. Coming through amid a scene centred around Brixton’s mythical venue The Windmill and the almost entirely male bands (Black Midi, Squid and more) that fronted it, for the women of Black Country, New Road, it’s about time. “Where were all the ladies at?! Quiet in the back. That’s kind of what it felt like,” suggests Hyde. “Not that anyone was bad or anything, but we just didn’t really know how to be heard. You get so used to it — well, I did — where sometimes I’d be upset or lost, but most of the time I’d just be like, ‘Well this is just how it is.’”
Forever Howlong, instead, takes all the adventurous musicality that has made the band one of the most critically acclaimed British breakthroughs of the decade so far, and shifts the lens, focusing on themes of female friendship and youthful reflection. Musically, there’s a lightness of touch to their third that pushes their innate sonic playfulness to the front rather than the knotty darkness of yore. A key marker of the group’s confidence in this new era can be found in their choice of producer: king of the big rock album, James Ford, who’s previously lent his chart-bothering touch to the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Foals and Blur.
“We were a bit afraid to work with James Ford at first because we didn’t want it to seem like we were trying to make a big rock record”
For Black Country, it wasn’t about trying to emulate the stadium sound of those bands. “I guess, in a way, we were a bit afraid to work with James Ford at first because we didn’t want it to seem like we were trying to make a big rock record,” says Mark. But equally, the group aren’t shying away from their more populist side that, among certain alternative quarters, could be seen as a dirty word. “I grew up loving Arctic Monkeys so there was quite a childish element where it was obviously very exciting to work with him,” grins drummer Charlie Wayne.
Though the sextet, with their classical instruments and experimental sensibilities, are hardly likely to be troubling Sabrina or Dua for mainstream airplay, on their third album — and most certainly in person — there’s a sense of fun and levity that they’ve not been associated with until this point. “We always get put on playlists like The Other List, or Everything Else,” laughs Mark. “Isn’t there one we were on that’s just called Confusing?”
“It’s good to make music that doesn’t fit into one category because then you can be on multiple playlists! That’s how we get all the plays right?!” chips in Hyde as Wayne deadpans, “And we’re just making millions and millions off those plays.”
Spotify billionaires they may not be quite yet, but in perhaps more meaningful ways, Black Country, New Road have stared disaster in the face and constructed their own route out of it; one that even feels like a model for how bands could operate going forward. Purposefully, they explain, Forever Howlong ends with Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me) and its final words of hope: “I’ve fallen in love with a feeling / To truly believe in”.
“I like hope. Hope is good,” nods Mark as they look ahead to the band’s future. Pause. “Beautiful name for a baby girl as well…”
