People like to throw around the phrases “long-awaited” and “highly anticipated” a lot. Sometimes it’s just PR hype speak, sometimes it’s really true. In the case of Black Country, New Road’s new album Forever Howlong, both feel particularly apt. BC,NR have long been one of the more feverishly, cultishly beloved acts to emerge from the free-form UK rock scene that emerged in the late ’10s, and the unpredictable arcs of their career have only heightened the curiosity around each of their next moves.

From the beginning, Black Country confounded the “post-punk” catch-all placed upon their generation of British bands, expanding out into klezmer-tinged post-rock; then, in the year between their 2021 debut For The First Time and their 2022 sophomore outing Ants From Up There, they abandoned all that entirely for a cinematic, melodramatic emo-indie. Then their frontman left just a few days before the album came out.

BC,NR’s subsequent growing pains and evolutions have already been captured thanks to the 2023 collection Live At Bush Hall, which featured yet another aesthetic shift helmed by existing members taking on vocal duties. Now a six-piece — Tyler Hyde, Lewis Evans, Georgia Ellery, May Kershaw, Charlie Wayne, and Luke Mark — BC,NR forged ahead and explored a kind of orchestral-pop indie not so far removed from the baroque corners of the genre in the ’00s.

Now, finally, this new iteration of BC,NR have made a proper studio album, and yet again are greeted by people making sense of a whole different era. In reality, Forever Howlong in many ways feels as if it extends logically from the BC,NR introduced on Live At Bush Hall, but taken further — buoyant, theatrical, intricate. Now led by Hyde, Kershaw, and Ellery, BC,NR have returned with a dense but vibrant album of shape-shifting arrangements and carefully layered instrumentation. Now that you can hear Forever Howlong for yourself, read our conversation below for the story behind each song on Black Country, New Road’s official rebirth.

1. “Besties

Some people have compared this to “Up Song” on Bush Hall, as a triumphant friendship proclamation to kick off a new era. But there’s really a sadness and yearning underlying it.

GEORGIA ELLERY: We opened it with it because it had the funny harpsichord intro. It wasn’t meant to be a lead on from “Up Song” at all, but I realized in hindsight people would think that with the name. It’s more tongue-in-cheek, as some have realized. It was also just a good vibe — that’s how we felt when we wrote it, and we thought it would be good to start with something loud, something that hits.

I read an interview in which you were a little confused and/or disheartened that people weren’t getting the actual vibe of the song.

ELLERY: [Laughs] That’s because I like it so much! No, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, right?

CHARLIE WAYNE: People can be entitled to their opinion, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong.

2. “The Big Spin”

The album bio referenced the fact that Georgia wrote “Besties” almost in response to this song, and there ended up being this dynamic between May and Tyler and Georgia where the songs were feeding into each other.

MAY KERSHAW: I think it was the last few that were written that were kind of bang, bang, bang. Before, some of them had been written over quite a long time. I had a few bits and pieces of songs I was working on where I wasn’t sure if any of it could work [for the band]. The band wanted to try this, and those last several songs — “The Big Spin,” “Besties,” “Happy Birthday” — just felt easy to arrange. We were in a flow, the songs were all a bit groovier.

I haven’t thought much about how useful it is to say what the song is actually about… The overall themes are about putting attachment into plants and trees and how they’re doing effects you… God, that was so vague. Sorry, I’m trying to say it without being very personal about my life, because it’s a very specific thing that happened in my life.

3. “Socks”

TYLER HYDE: This was one of the more daunting ones to bring to the group, because it’s a bit of a beast from an arrangement standpoint. Musically, it enters a few different worlds in five minutes. Heavily inspired by Van Dyke Parks. Charlie probably had the hardest time tackling this — it’s one of my least drum-friendly tracks. It was a mammoth in terms of putting drums on it, but orchestrally it was very fun.

WAYNE: It was difficult to write the drum parts on this — and throughout the album. A lot of them are songs that are sort of grooving and not grooving at the same time. “Socks” is very cool rhythmically. Unlike the other tracks, you don’t need to defer to other percussive bits like a tambourine. You can have some cool parts here in more segmented bits. I was listening to a lot of Fetch The Bolt Cutters. A lot of the drum parts on that are a massive reference for the drums here and across the album. I love the way the drums are arranged on Fiona Apple’s songs, particularly on that album.

While we’re talking about the difficulty of drums here — you all took on new instruments on the album too, right?

WAYNE: Everyone plays at least two instruments, not including the recorder. I’ve been playing the guitar for as long as I’ve been playing the drums, and I bought Lewis’ dad’s banjo a couple years ago and [have] been slowly learning how to play that. It’s more that there were songs — like, later on, “Nancy Tries To Take The Night” — the first half doesn’t have need for drums at all. We thought it’d be cool to have as many people playing stringed, guitar-y instruments as possible, and the timbre of the banjo lent itself quite nicely to that. On this album, it wasn’t about people playing in a room together as much as it was about accessing all the different music we could individually do and bring it together to create something broader.

4. “Salem Sisters”

HYDE: It was originally called “24/7” and it was a song Lewis sang about going to a barbecue at summertime. He decided he didn’t want to sing anymore and asked if I would sing it. It’s kind of similar to why we didn’t perform any songs Isaac used to sing on… it’s so wrong singing someone else’s lyrics when they’ve really performed it and it’s them. It’s like stepping on someone’s toes and character. I asked him if I could change the lyrics, but the brief remained barbecue.

I was really stuck with it. If you’re writing a song and you don’t write the lyrics there and then, sometimes you can never get back to it — you’re not in the place with the song. I ended up co-writing the lyrics with my partner, Rachid [Fakhre], and he came up with this incredible story. It’s talking about social anxiety, the fear of when you come across thinking you’re better than everyone else but actually you’re just really shy. Then it takes that into a fire and being stuck in a tree and a witch being burnt at the stake. It’s a rare one where when I sing it I am not myself nor am I Lewis nor am I Rachid. I’m some witch in between, and it’s kind of nice to lose myself in it.

Right, now you have several different lyricists, several different vocalists. Did you guys have conscious decisions about the tone or viewpoint of the songs, what the band’s vibe might be thematically now?

HYDE: There was a huge fear of lack of cohesion. The theme, if there is one, became about three different perspectives from three friends. It’s just a bunch of experiences, and that’s kind of what most albums are, anyway. You see moments where, lyrically, I’d say we all overlap a bit because of the influence of working together. But then you hear the specific qualities of one, and it becomes a celebration of the differences.

Since we’re talking about resetting with different vocalists. You did Bush Hall as a sort of transition, but this is still the first new studio album since Isaac’s departure. To hear you guys tell it, it seemed like there was a lot of joy and exploration in opening up this new palette. But were there also pressures and anxieties lingering since the Bush Hall era?

KERSHAW: I think we all went through waves of different feelings at different times. Every album is a bit scary, but for me it was accepting that there’ll be people where it’s not their cup of tea, and that’s the case with everything you put out. As long as the six of us like it, that’s something we can control. I think we did here.

5. “Two Horses”

I was thinking about the lightness people might perceive in the album, vs. the idea there’s still quite a bit of darkness underlying certain songs — but I also liked something one of you said in an interview, that darkness is easier to do creatively than happiness. I was thinking about that with this song, given its brutal conclusion. I was wondering how specifically you guys teased that out over time.

ELLERY: The light/dark conversation is funny, since it’s also so subjective. I guess I could see… we played lots of dark, angsty music. You want respite from that at some point. We’re artists that like exploring and change is part of that. We’re all different people. We all have different perspectives, and our own light and dark and how we express those emotions.

When we were writing these songs, I was interested in an airier texture. It’s probably a tonality thing — this song starts in a major key, so that’s probably why it feels “light.” Same with “Besties.” That’s what I vibe with in songs at the moment. But I also think the instruments we were playing had an effect. I was playing the mandolin, which is a very tonally bright instrument. Luke’s playing acoustic guitar, Charlie’s playing banjo.

This was the first song I wrote for Black Country, New Road, so it was sort of a tester. It was also the first song I wrote that was fictional. That was fun. To write and not engage with too much emotion, just a story that came from somewhere in my subconscious. It’s about a solo traveling woman and she’s got two horses and she’s traveling through these different fancy lands. She meets a guy at a bar, she’s having a good time, and then he kills her horses.

To me it’s almost a dark American frontier story — I mean, given I’m American, that’s what I hear in it. But was there something that drew you to that aesthetic?

ELLERY: I think it came from the music. It obviously has an American flavor to it. The guitar, that finger-picking style. The drums were inspired by Harry Nilsson. I think the setting came after that because that’s where my brain went. I’m not imagining… maybe this one movie but I’m not going to reference it because it’s very lame. [Laughs] I think the horse is a good symbol for ambition and strength, so you can read into what that may be in the meaning of the song.

6. “Mary”

All three of you sing together on this one.

HYDE: One conversation about cohesion was influence from the Roches, who obviously sing on pretty much every song all together. Sisterhood, kinship. It fits the song. This song is set at an all-girls’ school. It’s mimicking the narrative as well as providing vocal and emotional support through a story.

This is something that came up in some of the writing about the record, the idea that Forever Howlong emphasizes the feminine side of Black Country, New Road. Obviously there was a male vocalist before who was very much singing from the perspective of a young man. You’d mentioned earlier Lewis decided not to sing anymore, but I was curious if there at some point was a conscious decision to make it a record featuring the three of you as vocalists.

HYDE: It was just by chance. It was never an intention to provide the female experience of Black Country, New Road. Had there been other vocalists where things had worked, it would’ve been a different album. Lewis kind of blessed us with this cohesion.

7. “Happy Birthday”

HYDE: This has a three-chord movement that forms… the chorus? I find it difficult to label sections of our songs sometimes, even when I wrote them. Georgia used this pattern that’s very mechanical, an endless roll. It’s kind of like an injection that remains in your bones and in your mind. I remember when Georgia wrote “Besties,” I just couldn’t get it out — it just keeps rolling. So I nicked that from her. The aim, for a few of us at least, was to make an album that had some positive rock bangers that would feel great to play. This one was a drum song, it fucking slapped straight away. Musically, it was made to feel good to play and to have longevity, which is a big part of why I moved away from melodramatic songwriting. It’s so hard to repeatedly play that stuff a hundred times.

In terms of reference points, Fiona Apple has come up, and you’ve also spoken in interviews about Joanna Newsom. I also love that there seems to be this collective fascination with the Band on this record even though it doesn’t sound like them.

HYDE: We’d just think “What would the Band do?” Their spirit was in the room.

8. “For The Cold Country”

KERSHAW: This song was written over quite a long period of time. Maybe two years. It was a piano song at first. It took a while to find this arrangement. We had to do a lot of trial and error, trying different things out. I find it a lot harder writing lyrics after the fact. This was tricky in that way. It’s sort of messily written — I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

It feels like it was my year. It doesn’t feel like one specific “This is what it’s about.” It was a challenge but an interesting thing to look back on. I was getting frustrated maybe even up until the day we recorded it. But I made peace with it. It was fine if it wasn’t succinct, or the writing style I want to achieve now. It was a reflection of that year and I feel like I expressed myself in a way that doesn’t feel untrue. Did we have fun recording it? Yeah, I think we did! We tried different things, decided to add some timpani.

James Ford produced the album, and you’ve all mentioned how he fostered this environment of giving all those different sounds or arrangements a shot.

WAYNE: Sergio Maschetzko produced our last album, Ants From Up There He was our live sound engineer, and he was the perfect person for the job in that he was someone we already knew, a person totally inexperienced in a studio, a mad scientist. We were just trying to capture the band as good as we knew he could onstage.

We knew this album wasn’t going to be like that. It was about doing a proper studio album with a producer who could give us a bunch of options and give us space to do all the things we thought we should do. Record in different spaces, use lots of different microphones, lots of different techniques. James was the perfect guy for that. He did it all effortlessly. He wasn’t interested in putting his own sonic stamp on the record. He facilitated everything we wanted to do, and made the process 50 times easier than if we’d done it ourselves. When it came to stuff like the timpani, he’s also a musician principally — he had opinions about everything and would know his way around basically all the instruments. He had this big box of percussion stuff; he brought a massive marching band drum to put in front of the kick drum because he thought it’d sound interesting.

9. “Nancy Tries To Take The Night”

HYDE: This came in when we were touring Bush Hall. It was one of the least formed songs I brought. It was in two sections. A verse which was all funky guitar, a chorus that was dramatic piano. Charlie touched on this earlier, but we wanted to not use drums but have a percussive texture — which is what the use of several stringed instruments does.

Lyrically, it’s a collection of snippets of real-life experiences or things I’ve witnessed, all to do with women and struggles specific women or general women or myself have been through. They’re all very dark. In order to enjoy listening and visualizing and performing, I put it in the Dickensian world of Nancy from Oliver Twist. Originally the song ended in this really silly way, which we decided to scrap because sometimes we’re too silly. It was a motif that ended on a major chord, which is just naff as hell. I liked the idea, because it echoed the end of the Oliver Twist musical. We’ve just seen Nancy brutally murdered, beaten to death by Bill Sikes. The final shot then is Fagin and the Artful Dodger skipping off into the moonlight. It became an outtake, but that’s how much we were leaning into the story of Nancy.

10. “Forever Howlong”

The title appears in the lyrics of “Besties” but doesn’t arrive again until now. Does the phrase mean something different in each song?

KERSHAW: It does for me. It’s an open phrase that can mean different things for different people listening.

ELLERY: For me the title clicked into place when I saw the cover art. It makes me think of space, and the sun and the moon.

Did it originate with you, or here with May’s song?

ELLERY: I think someone said it in rehearsal. It’s not like misheard lyrics, but when you say something a bit grammatically wrong… we find that funny as a collective. Charlie tends to write down album names throughout the rehearsals. I think that just got added to the list. I didn’t have a lyric for that bit of “Besties” and I just put it in. There’s not always bags of thought that go into it. Sometimes we make sense of it after.

WAYNE: I think it’s cool to have a title track in an album. It’s another thing that conceptually holds it together. You can always put too much emphasis onto it. As far as you want to grasp your own meaning from it, it’s a fun thing to grasp onto.

11. “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)”

ELLERY: This is a really old song that was written for the band. It probably would’ve been on Bush Hall if I’d had the time. I wasn’t touring with these guys as much since I was doing stuff with Jockstrap. Tyler sung it at the beginning for a couple gigs. We came back to trying to arrange it with me singing and it just wasn’t working at that time. Probably because I felt quite disconnected from the band, since I hadn’t been playing a lot. We shelved it and decided to come back to it when we’d had enough time apart from it to rework it. I was enjoying that it was quite simple and outro-ish.

Since this is the final thought on the album, there was a larger thing I was curious about. Much has been made about the stylistic differences across Black Country, New Road’s output at this point. To me, at least, there’s a logical evolution between Bush Hall and this, the different lineup era. But, nevertheless, a lot of people are emphasizing a hard break from the past. Now that you’ve completed this album after all this exploration, what do you think the path forward is? Like, every time Black Country, New Road returns, it’s reimagined? Or do you feel that you have struck on something that works for the six of you remaining in the band?

HYDE: We didn’t choose any of this. The different directions. It was always out of our hands. Now that it’s happened so many times, maybe it’s in our blood. Maybe this is just how it’s going to be. This is what we know. That’s actually so exciting. But honestly, we don’t know. If we stick with this… we were on a roll with something with something at the end. After the album was recorded, we took a break. We’re not in that flow, that state, anymore. I reckon it’ll progress on to something else when we start writing again. We’ll be very different people with different experiences by the time we write again, so my gut tells me it’ll be different again. Also, at some point, everyone will be singing. That’s the goal.

Forever Howlong is out now via Ninja Tune.