Album: Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road (2022)
Genre: Rock
Record Label: Ninja Tune
Format: Album

Description: Traditionally, a band release their debut album and head out for an extended stretch on the road, honing their live chops, twisting their songs into new shapes. But when Black Country, New Road released For the First Time in February 2021, that route was blocked off by the pandemic. Instead, the London-based band set out to tweak and tamper with their experimental post-rock sound for a transformative second album. They might not have been able to travel, but their music could. “By the time the first album came out, those songs had existed for so long that we were very keen to change the way we wrote music,” bassist Tyler Hyde tells Apple Music. The material that makes up their second record, Ants From Up There, soon came to life, the group using the labyrinthine “Basketball Shoes”, which had been around before their debut, as a springboard. “We wanted to explore the themes we’d created on that song,” says Hyde. “It’s essentially three songs within one, all of which relatively cover the emotions and moods that are on the album. It’s hopeful and light, but still looks at some of the darker sides that the first album showed.” 
The resultant record sees the band hit hypnotic new peaks. Ants From Up There, recorded before the departure of singer Isaac Wood in January 2022, is less reliant on jerky, rhythmic U-turns than their debut (although there is some of that), with expansive, Godspeed You! Black Emperor-ish atmospherics emerging in their place. “Fundamentally, we relearned an entirely new style of playing with each other,” says drummer Charlie Wayne. “We learned a lot about how to express ourselves just for each other rather than for anything else going on externally.” Here Hyde, Wayne and saxophonist Lewis Evans take us through it, track by track. 
“Intro”
Lewis Evans: “This uses the theme from ’Basketball Shoes’, compressed into these little micro cells and repeated over and over again. It’s just a straight-up, impactful welcome to the album.” 
“Chaos Space Marine”
Tyler Hyde: “In this song, we allowed ourselves to get out all the stupid, funny joke style of playing. It was just our way of saying yes to everything. There are many things across the album—and in previous songs from the last album—that are seemingly good ideas, but they’ve come about through a joke. I think the rest of the album is much more considered than that. It’s our silly song. It’s a voyage. It’s a sea shanty. It’s a space trip.” 
“Concorde”
Charlie Wayne: “I love how it follows the same chord progression the whole way through, and it’s driven but very soft. It’s got real moments of delicacy, and it’s a song that we all thought quite a lot about when we were getting it together. When you’re restricted to that one-chord sequence, you want it to feel as though it’s going somewhere and progressing, so the peaks and troughs have to be considered.” 
“Bread Song”
LE: “It’s like two different songs in one. You’ve got this really quite flowing and free track in a melodic and conventional harmonic way, but rhythmically free and flowing accompaniment to Isaac’s vocals. It feels quite orchestral, and the way that we all play together on this recording is so in sync with each other. We were listening to each other so much, so the swells that one person starts making, people start responding to, and everybody is swelling at the same time and getting quieter at the same time. Then it turns into this almost Soweto, kind of township-style pop tune at the end. It’s a really fun ending to an intense, emotional tune.” 
“Good Will Hunting”
LE: “This is another slightly silly one, and it’s got a really silly ending which actually never made the cut on the album, but it’s heavily driven by the riff on the guitars. I think at the time we were listening to quite a bit of Kurt Vile, especially rhythmically. I can remember a conversation about when we wanted the drums to come in and to be super straight, super driven. Then for the choruses, rhythmically, to completely flip and not feel like they were big at all. So for both the choruses, the drums are just tiny.” 
“Haldern”
TH: “We were playing at Haldern Pop Festival in north Germany during lockdown. We’d just been allowed to fly for work purposes, and we were doing this session. We did two performances there, and the second one was a livestream, and we weren’t allowed to play songs that weren’t released. At the time, that left us with not very much that we weren’t already bored with, so we decided to do some improv. It was a very lucky day where we were all very in sync with one another. So ‘Haldern’ was totally from improv, which is not how we write ever.” 
“Mark’s Theme”
LE: “This is a tune written kind of for my uncle who passed away from COVID in 2021. I wrote it on my tenor saxophone as soon as I found out. I just started playing and wrote that. It’s a reflection on him and my feelings towards him passing away and everything being really bleak. He was a massive fan and supporter of the band, so it felt right to put that on the album and to have his name remembered with our music.” 
“The Place Where He Inserted the Blade”
CW: “For me, this is about as far away as we went from the first album. Aesthetically, where the first album has moments of real dissonance and apathy, ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’ is very warm and rich and quite uplifting. I think it strikes right to the heart of what the album is for me, which is fundamentally being in the room, making music with my friends.” 
“Snow Globes”
LE: “This is another tune where we really thought about what we wanted from it before we wrote it. We had examples of things we liked, and one of them was Frank Ocean’s ‘White Ferrari’. We liked the idea of it almost being like two different bands [playing] at the same time. So you’ve got this quite simple but quite heart-wrenching, fugal-sounding arrangement of all the instruments with a drum solo that is just crazy and doesn’t really relate too much to what is going on in the other instruments. We react to the drum solo, but he doesn’t react to us. It’s that kind of idea.” 
“Basketball Shoes”
TH: “It’s essentially a medley of the whole album. It’s got literal musical motifs that are repeated on different songs in the album. It touches on all the themes that we’ve been exploring, and it’s the most climactic song on the album. It wouldn’t really make sense to not finish with it, it’s so exhausting. It’s such a journey. I think you just wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to anything that followed it because you’d be so wiped out after listening to it.”

Related Artists: black midi, Geese, Squid

Music Scene: Part of the English music scene. Emerged in the contemporary era. Associated with Rock movement.

Tags: Rock, 2020s, Album, Ninja Tune

Additional Context: Rating score: 10. Based on 1 votes

Traditionally, a band release their debut album and head out for an extended stretch on the road, honing their live chops, twisting their songs into new shapes. But when Black Country, New Road released For the First Time in February 2021, that route was blocked off by the pandemic. Instead, the London-based band set out to tweak and tamper with their experimental post-rock sound for a transformative second album. They might not have been able to travel, but their music could. “By the time the first album came out, those songs had existed for so long that we were very keen to change the way we wrote music,” bassist Tyler Hyde tells Apple Music. The material that makes up their second record, Ants From Up There, soon came to life, the group using the labyrinthine “Basketball Shoes”, which had been around before their debut, as a springboard. “We wanted to explore the themes we’d created on that song,” says Hyde. “It’s essentially three songs within one, all of which relatively cover the emotions and moods that are on the album. It’s hopeful and light, but still looks at some of the darker sides that the first album showed.” 
The resultant record sees the band hit hypnotic new peaks. Ants From Up There, recorded before the departure of singer Isaac Wood in January 2022, is less reliant on jerky, rhythmic U-turns than their debut (although there is some of that), with expansive, Godspeed You! Black Emperor-ish atmospherics emerging in their place. “Fundamentally, we relearned an entirely new style of playing with each other,” says drummer Charlie Wayne. “We learned a lot about how to express ourselves just for each other rather than for anything else going on externally.” Here Hyde, Wayne and saxophonist Lewis Evans take us through it, track by track. 
“Intro”
Lewis Evans: “This uses the theme from ’Basketball Shoes’, compressed into these little micro cells and repeated over and over again. It’s just a straight-up, impactful welcome to the album.” 
“Chaos Space Marine”
Tyler Hyde: “In this song, we allowed ourselves to get out all the stupid, funny joke style of playing. It was just our way of saying yes to everything. There are many things across the album—and in previous songs from the last album—that are seemingly good ideas, but they’ve come about through a joke. I think the rest of the album is much more considered than that. It’s our silly song. It’s a voyage. It’s a sea shanty. It’s a space trip.” 
“Concorde”
Charlie Wayne: “I love how it follows the same chord progression the whole way through, and it’s driven but very soft. It’s got real moments of delicacy, and it’s a song that we all thought quite a lot about when we were getting it together. When you’re restricted to that one-chord sequence, you want it to feel as though it’s going somewhere and progressing, so the peaks and troughs have to be considered.” 
“Bread Song”
LE: “It’s like two different songs in one. You’ve got this really quite flowing and free track in a melodic and conventional harmonic way, but rhythmically free and flowing accompaniment to Isaac’s vocals. It feels quite orchestral, and the way that we all play together on this recording is so in sync with each other. We were listening to each other so much, so the swells that one person starts making, people start responding to, and everybody is swelling at the same time and getting quieter at the same time. Then it turns into this almost Soweto, kind of township-style pop tune at the end. It’s a really fun ending to an intense, emotional tune.” 
“Good Will Hunting”
LE: “This is another slightly silly one, and it’s got a really silly ending which actually never made the cut on the album, but it’s heavily driven by the riff on the guitars. I think at the time we were listening to quite a bit of Kurt Vile, especially rhythmically. I can remember a conversation about when we wanted the drums to come in and to be super straight, super driven. Then for the choruses, rhythmically, to completely flip and not feel like they were big at all. So for both the choruses, the drums are just tiny.” 
“Haldern”
TH: “We were playing at Haldern Pop Festival in north Germany during lockdown. We’d just been allowed to fly for work purposes, and we were doing this session. We did two performances there, and the second one was a livestream, and we weren’t allowed to play songs that weren’t released. At the time, that left us with not very much that we weren’t already bored with, so we decided to do some improv. It was a very lucky day where we were all very in sync with one another. So ‘Haldern’ was totally from improv, which is not how we write ever.” 
“Mark’s Theme”
LE: “This is a tune written kind of for my uncle who passed away from COVID in 2021. I wrote it on my tenor saxophone as soon as I found out. I just started playing and wrote that. It’s a reflection on him and my feelings towards him passing away and everything being really bleak. He was a massive fan and supporter of the band, so it felt right to put that on the album and to have his name remembered with our music.” 
“The Place Where He Inserted the Blade”
CW: “For me, this is about as far away as we went from the first album. Aesthetically, where the first album has moments of real dissonance and apathy, ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’ is very warm and rich and quite uplifting. I think it strikes right to the heart of what the album is for me, which is fundamentally being in the room, making music with my friends.” 
“Snow Globes”
LE: “This is another tune where we really thought about what we wanted from it before we wrote it. We had examples of things we liked, and one of them was Frank Ocean’s ‘White Ferrari’. We liked the idea of it almost being like two different bands [playing] at the same time. So you’ve got this quite simple but quite heart-wrenching, fugal-sounding arrangement of all the instruments with a drum solo that is just crazy and doesn’t really relate too much to what is going on in the other instruments. We react to the drum solo, but he doesn’t react to us. It’s that kind of idea.” 
“Basketball Shoes”
TH: “It’s essentially a medley of the whole album. It’s got literal musical motifs that are repeated on different songs in the album. It touches on all the themes that we’ve been exploring, and it’s the most climactic song on the album. It wouldn’t really make sense to not finish with it, it’s so exhausting. It’s such a journey. I think you just wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to anything that followed it because you’d be so wiped out after listening to it.”

Album: For the First Time by Black Country, New Road (2021)
Genre: Rock
Record Label: Ninja Tune
Format: Album

Description: “I don't think it's an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it's an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that's basically all it can be, and that's the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—For the First Time is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering”. Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France”, it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. 
Instrumental
“It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” 
Athens, France
“We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn't do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn't the case, and that's what made me most uncomfortable.” 
Science Fair
“I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there's many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It's the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” 
Sunglasses
“It was a genuine realisation that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn't necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognise in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they're the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” 
Track X
“I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard World of Echo by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favourite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn't play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that's in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” 
Opus
“‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It's rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realise that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn't really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

Related Artists: black midi, Geese, Squid

Music Scene: Part of the English music scene. Emerged in the contemporary era. Associated with Rock movement.

Tags: Rock, 2020s, Album, Ninja Tune

“I don't think it's an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it's an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that's basically all it can be, and that's the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—For the First Time is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering”. Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France”, it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. 
Instrumental
“It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” 
Athens, France
“We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn't do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn't the case, and that's what made me most uncomfortable.” 
Science Fair
“I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there's many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It's the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” 
Sunglasses
“It was a genuine realisation that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn't necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognise in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they're the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” 
Track X
“I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard World of Echo by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favourite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn't play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that's in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” 
Opus
“‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It's rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realise that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn't really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

Album: Forever Howlong by Black Country, New Road (2025)
Format: Album

Artist Background: Black Country, New Road (commonly abbreviated to BCNR or BC,NR) are an English rock band formed in London in 2018, consisting of Isaac Wood (vocals, guitar), Tyler Hyde (bass), Lewis Evans (saxophone), Georgia Ellery (violin), May Kershaw (keys), Charlie Wayne (drums) and Luke Mark (guitar). Their sound has been described as experimental rock with the band being compared to 90s acts such as Slint. Part of the English music scene. Emerged in the contemporary era. Associated with Rock movement.

Related Artists: black midi, Geese, Squid

Music Scene: Part of the English music scene. Emerged in the contemporary era. Associated with Rock movement.

Tags: 2020s, Album


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 realised 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.”

Black Country, New Road

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