When May Kershaw stepped on stage at London’s Bush Hall a week before Christmas 2022, the ground was moving beneath the feet of the classically trained musician and her five bandmates in the shapeshifting art-pop outfit Black Country, New Road.
Lauded by critics and obsessed over by fans, the beloved Cambridge-born ensemble was reintroducing themselves to a live audience for the first time without the brooding warble of frontman Isaac Wood, who left the group for mental health reasons four days before the release of their hotly anticipated sophomore album, Ants from Up There, 10 months earlier.
For the longtime friends who met as teenagers, the three-night run of high-profile gigs — later memorialized on the recording Live at Bush Hall — felt like a trust fall. They weren’t just venturing into new territory without their singular lead vocalist; they were scrapping the entire songbook that had earned the collective a devoted following since turning heads with their Mercury Music Prize-nominated debut a year prior. They were, to put it plainly, starting over.
“It was really scary, but we got through it,” Kershaw, 27, tells Boulder Weekly on a video call from a Chicago hotel room with percussionist Charlie Wayne. “It was a really supportive audience who were wanting us to succeed in this new venture, and that was really nice. It felt like a very short amount of time that we prepared the material. So there was kind of a rushed element to it, but maybe that also helped, because we didn't have too much time to overthink. Maybe if we let it stew for longer, it would have been even scarier.”
From there, the band lit out on a grueling world tour with a new configuration, swapping their angular post-punk stylings for a sound that was brighter, bouncier and more baroque. Instead of replacing Wood with an outside hire, the now six-piece outfit redistributed their roles with pianist Kershaw splitting vocal and songwriting duties alongside bassist Tyler Hyde and alto saxophonist Lewis Evans (who would later turn the mic over to mandolinist Georgia Ellery). The shake-up was a seismic shift for a group that had carved a singular niche among critics and listeners in the U.K. and beyond.
“Uncertainty has always kind of defined most of what the band has done really, so it hasn't been a massive change as far as that's concerned,” Wayne, 25, says. “We've always done things in a way which is fairly nonlinear. Our fans have been surprisingly resilient and seem to kind of embrace the change, which is cool. Obviously there is a bit of an identity of the band, which some people still expect it to be — and it isn't any more, necessarily, but that's alright. It's still a very, very lucky position to be in.”
Change is a sound
A little more than two years after their onstage reinvention, Black Country, New Road returned last month with Forever Howlong, the collective’s first studio recording under the new lineup. Continuing the sonic transformation that began with their pivotal live album, the expansive third offering is galaxies apart from the wild and wiry sound built in the late 2010s alongside fellow avant-garde breakouts like Black Midi, Squid and Fontaines D.C.
In place of Wood’s anguished and inward speak-singing howl, a trio of women’s voices blossoms across the new double LP’s sprawling, 52-minute runtime. Crashing between rollicking waves of volume-up chamber pop (“Happy Birthday”), surreal psych-folk (“Two Horses”) and polite early-aughts indie rock (“Salem Sisters”), Forever Howlong finds cohesion among its three songwriters through an unhinged swirl of narrative texture and stunning instrumentation that is at turns delicious and demanding.
“I feel like we’ve influenced each other in a lot of ways I'm only beginning to notice,” Kershaw says of the band’s collective approach to songcraft. “Just through spending so much time together, listening to Tyler’s and Georgia’s songs and working on them, I think the way we arrange — all six of us — has really influenced all of our individual processes.”
Take the album’s heady title track, penned by Kershaw, borrowing its name from a line tucked into the back end of Tyler Hide’s effervescent opening jam, “Besties.” While the latter single pulls its energy from a propulsive groove of squealing sax and irresistible hooks, Kershaw’s strange and somber day-in-the-life epic reaches for something more disarming.
“I shall boil some beans / I should get my Vitamin B,” she sings achingly over an orchestra of fluttering recorders. “The last video I watched told me the pH of my gut microbiome was certainly causing my blues / So I fill myself up with fiber / As dusk begins to set.”
‘Friends forever!’
With the miraculous and the mundane sitting side by side on Forever Howlong, the half-dozen members of Black Country, New Road are embracing their new era with an earthbound shrug and a wandering eye toward the cosmos as they continue their unpredictable evolution.
“We like playing together, and it feels like there’s still more directions left to go. That's always worth exploring,” Kershaw says. “It's just kind of lucky people have liked it. There's a risk that you make something people don't like, but you’ve got to be willing to be OK with that.”
To hear them tell it, a big part of the band’s appetite for risk-taking comes from their bedrock bond as longtime friends. The theme percolates throughout the 11-track offering, but it also lives in the arrangements themselves, with each acoustic instrument in giddy conversation like yapping besties at a delirious childhood sleepover.
“I've been playing with these musicians in one way or another since I was 16, and I'm about to turn 26. It's kind of a nuts thing to be in that position where they were more or less friends I knew from school, and [performing together] has now turned into my full-time job,” Wayne says. “There’s a friendship that exists outside of that, which is an enormous support. It means the band doesn't necessarily have to adhere to these super rigid structures, where this is this and that is that.”
Perhaps the band put it best in the triumphant chorus of the opening track from their transformational live album. Partners on the precipice of an uncertain new frontier, the resilient young bruisers lean on each other as they cast a nostalgic glance back, and a confident nod to the future: “Look at what we did together / BC,NR: friends forever!”
ON THE BILL: St. Vincent with Black Country, New Road. 8 p.m. Friday, May 16, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop St., Denver. $65