Forever Howlong is a messy, human triumph for Black Country, New Road

The band has always been fundamentally collaborative. Members would come up with ideas in pods and report back to the group, one where an entire seven-piece band could improvise and write an entire verse-chorus-verse song on stage and put it on their album almost verbatim. But on 2022's Ants From Up There, Black Country, New Road’s previous album and instant chamber-rock classic, Wood defined the feeling of the band’s entire sound: intense in both its silence and its massive crescendos, marked by Wood’s anxious talk-singing through heart-rending abstract poetry. Nothing sounded quite like Black Country, New Road

And nothing sounds quite like this album either, but for an entirely different reason: instead of one frontman harnessing the energy of a talented sixpiece, for the first time, the diversity of the band’s talent is fully on display, not just as instrumentalists but writers, as curators of a full package.

Forever Howlong is largely written by a group of three people, and by three women. That change towards a group-led direction comes with its own set of challenges: this is easily Black Country, New Road’s least cohesive album yet. While threaded together by femininity and love (between kinda-maybe-just friends, or between a person and a feeling, or between a traveller and a man who exploits her, or just between two lovers), it still somewhat lacks a clear throughline in more ways than one. The lyricism varies from blunt character portraits and slice-of-life vignettes to political commentary and extended metaphors. While every track stands magnificently on its own, some get buried in the wider perspective of the album.

Nevertheless, none of anything on this album is quite like anything else, and absolutely none of it is anything like Wood’s cryptic melancholia. The decision to pivot was a risk – as borne out by online mixed responses to the group’s newly melodic and female-led sound – but a risk absolutely worth taking. As great as Black Country, New Road’s output was before this, they succeed most on Forever Howlong when they stray furthest from their comfort zone and indulge some of their most creative and exciting ideas yet. It’d be hard to imagine the band even a few years ago making songs like the title track, whose main backing track is a chorus of recorders, or the folksy, progressive country-inspired “Two Horses”, but they work exquisitely.

The breathtaking writing and vocal contributions on Forever Howlong are handled by women like bassist Tyler Hyde, who handles many of the album’s most political and feminist tracks in addition to one ode to a long-term relationship; violinist Georgia Ellery, whose tracks bookend the album with beautifully detailed, clear character vignettes about the complexities of womanhood and love; and keyboardist May Kershaw, whose writing centers on the minute details of life as indicators of everything from blinding joy to numbing sadness. Black Country, New Road has always been egalitarian, collaborative, and universally talented – “friends forever” – and still, it’s stunning how well their three styles work with each other on this project. After all, my three favorite tracks on this album are all written, one each, by the album’s three main songwriters: Ellery’s aforementioned “Two Horses”, a metaphoric, vaguely Western piece that plays out like a cynical inversion of the Parable of the Good Samaritan; Kershaw’s “From The Cold Country”, a towering and mythical ode to love through peace and chaos (and featuring an absolutely breathtaking breakdown in the song’s final moments that I’d be remiss to not mention); and Hyde’s “Nancy Tries to Take The Night”, a heart-rending second-person narration about forcing oneself into the mold of female social respectability.

It’s difficult to discuss this album outside the context of Wood’s departure, but I believe that understanding it solely through the lens of Black Country, New Road’s past work does the album a disservice. After all, for a band marked by overflowing creativity and constant creative pivots, this is hardly their biggest change in sound. And it’s still distinctly a Black Country, New Road album: see the way these tracks build and fall apart and build back up, the saxophone and keyboard lines floating throughout, the arpeggiated chamber pop melodies. This album, as different as it is from the band’s other output, is simultaneously the most distinct Black Country, New Road has ever been.

That’s especially remarkable given the range of voices and perspectives represented across Forever Howlong: from euphoria to exhaustion, from puppy love to forever, from the universal to the insignificant. But it’s true nonetheless. This might be the most disjointed Black Country, New Road album yet, but even for this strong-willed group of composers, Forever Howlong also has a solid vision for the future. It’s a group of friends, writing about and sharing life through all its powers and mundanities alike, creating some of the best music in recent rock history with no signs of stopping.

More than any specific motifs or emotions, both of which Forever Howlong have in spades, this album’s strongest theme to me was the feeling of the slow, steady feeling of transcending depression: of moving towards living a life that is merely normal instead of damped, where highs and lows finally exist in equal quantities, where the lows are manageable even if persistent and the highs are exceptionally, effortlessly high. Black Country, New Road formerly explored the narrow gamut ranging from jittery sexual anxiety to the slow dissolution of romance, but everything about the band has expanded outward since then: they’ve never sounded this full before.

By the album’s final track, when Georgia Ellery sings tenderly that she’s “fallen in love with a feeling,” it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what feeling she could be talking about, but at the end of this journey of an album, as instruments and choral vocals reach the sky, you feel it in your bones – that feeling is the joy and pain of living: living as a woman, a lover, a friend, a soul. On Forever Howlong, Black Country, New Road hasn’t exactly grown up – they were a perfectly grown-up band before this – but they’ve transitioned, found a few new friends, and lived a few more lives. The result is an album that’s messy, incohesive, and purely, beautifully human.