Forever Howlong
By the time Black Country, New Road released their sprawling second album *Ants from Up There* in 2022, lead vocalist Isaac Wood had departed the London-based indie experimentalists and a magical first phase of the group had come to a close. Rather than tour those records without their original singer, they rejigged their dynamic and wrote a whole new batch of songs—captured on 2023’s *Live at Bush Hall*—to initiate a new period of the band where vocals and much of the songwriting were led by Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw. It made for an exhilarating fresh start and their third album *Forever Howlong* directly picks up from the momentum of starting over again. “We’d done a lot of touring of the live album and we really wanted to further develop this new lineup and write new songs so we could get them into the set list,” saxophonist Lewis Evans tells Apple Music. “There’s a whole bunch of songs within the album that were written fairly early on as a buffer to the *Live at Bush Hall* songs so we could not have to play the same thing every single night.” That feeling of trying to capture the energy and edginess of a live show runs right through *Forever Howlong*. It’s a record of tightly mapped baroque folk pop, jagged indie explosions, and woodwind-heavy art-rock explorations, and it feels punchier and more contained than their previous work. “\[The songs\] developed way more on the live setting,” says Evans. “Our headspace was to really make sure that all of the songs that were brought into the writing room, to the rehearsal room, were arranged in such a way that the song could be served as well as possible and not adding anything to it that didn’t need to be there.” Drummer Charlie Wayne thinks that, even without the lineup change, the band was always heading towards doing something different. “I think it was always trending in this direction,” he says. “Having the three different singers definitely gave it a different quality, both in terms of the outcome and also in the actual songwriting. Three different perspectives grants you three completely different worlds to dive into and to try and pull together.” Let Evans and Wayne guide you through *Forever Howlong*, track by track. **“Besties”** Lewis Evans: “It’s a great big fanfare opening, really ramshackle and swashbuckling. It’s a great introduction into the new sound. It’s still got this very BCNR musical-communication thing that we have but also feels like a new style. That’s also why it was good to do as the first single, it was a good welcome to the new thing.” **“The Big Spin”** LE: “This was the first of the songs which we’re calling the Holy Trinity on the record, those songs being ‘The Big Spin,’ ‘Besties,’ and ‘Happy Birthday,’ which all came together at a very similar time. May brought this song in. It was much more light-hearted and groovy, and it had this light feel that we haven’t had before as a band. That went on to really inspire Georgia’s writing for ‘Besties,’ which then really inspired Tyler’s writing for ‘Happy Birthday,’ so this was the start of the domino effect of those three pop-ish songs on the record.” **“Socks”** Charlie Wayne: “This was one that we wrote at the beginning of last year. I think we saw Tyler performing a version of it on the piano before we’d thought about it as a band thing. It’s weird because it’s like a mini musical in itself, there are loads of ups and downs, and you can really focus in on the songwriter and the voice, and the band operates around it and expands and contracts. There are moments of real softness and rubato, that the time is moving in and out and it’s not, you’re just focusing in on the piano. Tyler recorded it all in that way, and the band had to try and play around her performance instincts where she allowed herself to just be on the piano playing with it.” **“Salem Sisters”** LE: “I originally wrote this song and sang on it live for a while when I was singing in the band for a short spell. I decided against singing anymore because I just didn’t enjoy it whatsoever. I thought that Tyler would be best suited for singing it. She wrote new lyrics, and it benefits a lot more from her vocals. I wasn’t able to bring what she can to the song. It’s like the closest we get to a ’70s songwriter-y throwback tune on the record I think but it still retains quite a bit of weirdness that I don’t think would exist quite yet in the ’70s. It’s a catchy song.” **“Two Horses”** CW: “This slightly preceded the actual getting under the bonnet and figuring out what the album is. It was the first time that Georgia really felt as though she brought a song specifically for BCNR with the intention of figuring out what her songwriting was going to maybe look like. Georgia had written a pretty good, complete song and all the arrangements had already been thought out. One of the big takeaways in the album is just serving songs and sometimes they don’t need to be these enormous expansive things, no one needs to be playing extremely loud all the time. It can just be following the journey.” LE: “This is quite a unique record for us because there’s no one way that we’ve written all the songs. This one is the only time we’ve ever written a song where it was all thought out before it was in the practice room. Georgia had a proper Brian Wilson imagination with this song and she knew exactly how she wanted it to sound. We were like, ‘No, let’s put our own thing on it,’ and then it worked out actually better the way that she decided it in the first place.” **“Mary”** CW: “This is the bit in the album where you can kind of step back from the instrumentation, which can often be a massive focal point of the band. It was a song that was always just going to work with the three vocals. It’s heavily inspired by The Roches. Having very light instrumentation behind it gives you the opportunity to see it as like group storytelling, watching those voices deviate away from each other and then come back.” **“Happy Birthday”** LE: “This was the quickest song to put together. It basically arranged itself. Tyler played us a couple of songs that she’d been writing when she went on a writing retreat in Italy with some friends. She played ‘Happy Birthday,’ which was called ‘Kids’ at the time, but we didn’t want to name it the same as the MGMT song, so we opted for a more famous song. We took it into the rehearsal room and just banged it out in a couple rehearsals, really. It was so satisfying and punchy, it really felt like we were so in the groove at that point. We all knew what the record was. We all knew at that point this song was going to be the thing that completes the album a little bit.” **“For the Cold Country”** LE: “May played this for the first time on the piano, or at the rough outline of it, when we were mixing *Live at Bush Hall*. I remember being like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy. How the fuck are we going to make that into a BCNR song?’ We spent the next two years trying to write it, because it is just unwieldy and enormous.” CW: “It didn’t really make sense until we’d gotten into the studio and we felt as though we could place everyone in a small room and then expand out again from there.” LE: “This was one of those songs that really didn’t benefit from us playing it loads live because we realized what was best suited for it was that the first half be this acoustic, really acoustic, warm, woody feeling section that would then open up into a more expansive guitars would turn electric.” **“Nancy Tries to Take the Night”** LE: “This was also an earlier-stage one. Tyler had the whole first half of the song, just the two acoustic guitars and the chorus, the chorus melody thing that happens. The whole minimalist section hadn’t yet been written. We felt like we wanted a new part of the song, and so I wrote this minimalist cell block kind of thing. It was quite inspired by something that I heard on a new Kiran Leonard record. That allowed us to have these two very different sections that are really contrasting.” **“Forever Howlong”** CW: “We started off doing a band arrangement for this and it didn’t quite fit. After speaking about it, May was like, ‘I think maybe it would sound really good if all of us were playing five clarinets as an arrangement,’ which was a cool idea, but maybe slightly impractical. The next best step was five recorders. The beginning of the song is fairly sparse and simple because all of us didn’t know how to properly play the recorder, and it gets more complicated towards the end. The bit at the end, which is a bit like a carousel, is a bit of a victory lap for us because we just all get our individual parts to play because we can all actually play them. The Royal Society of Recorders and Recorder Players should be getting in touch soon.” **“Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)”** LE: “This is the oldest song on the record. Georgia brought this in when we were writing *…Bush Hall* stuff in 2022 and because she just wasn’t around enough because of Jockstrap commitments \[Ellery is also one half of Jockstrap\], we didn’t play it. We’d kind of made a half-baked version of it and it was good, but it really wasn’t sitting with the stuff that we were doing on *…Bush Hall*. But then as these songs like ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘The Big Spin’ and ‘Besties’ came about, it really started to make more sense. We were really trying to go for a Neil Young thing on this tune, and the way that it can feel loose, but also there’s a deeper feeling in the pit of your stomach about it that is an unexplainable thing that just grooves. I don’t know if we quite achieved it, but the ending was meant to sound like The Beta Band’s ‘Dry the Rain.’ I don’t know if we achieved that at all! It ends up its own thing a bit, which is what you aim for when you say you want to have a reference for something—if it ends up not sounding like that, then you’ve won a little bit.”
As different as Forever Howlong is from the band’s other output, is simultaneously the most distinct Black Country, New Road has ever been.
London sextet return with Black Country, New Road their third studio album, ‘Forever Howlong’ – and they’ve still got it.
Catalysed by their restless reinvention, Black Country, New Road's new album Forever Howlong proves that the possibilities for this tight bunch remain endless.
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