Black Country, New Road are a-changin’. An amalgamation of old and new, a splicing together of driving post-punk, muscular art-pop, and nostalgic folk-rock, their third studio album, ‘Forever Howlong’, sees the sextet redefine themselves in the image of the heartfelt songwriters of a bygone era.

This is the band’s first studio album since former frontman Isaac Wood left the band in 2022, announced just before their soaring second album ‘Ants from Up Here’, before the remaining members took a not-so-brief foray into the exciting world of the live album via ‘Live at Bush Hall’. By replacing Isaac’s bold, reverberating vocals with the varied yet tonally similar vocals of violinist Georgia Ellery, bassist Tyler Hyde, and keyboardist May Kershaw, the band knew that they were making a very different album to anything they had done before.

“One thing that led the direction of everything, words or music, was the longevity of us enjoying ourselves,” Tyler recalls. “We wanted to avoid being too melodramatic. It was about grooving and not being too transparently emotional. There’s obviously lyrics that mean something to each of us, but it’s covered with storytelling.”

Saxophonist Lewis Evans nods: “You’ve got to play these songs on tour night after night; you can’t be putting yourself through emotional trauma every time we go on stage!”

This focus on enjoyment was distilled during their 2.5 years on the road touring ‘Live at Bush Hall’. An experience that the band are clearly unbelievably grateful for – how many bands do you know that could perform the same nine songs for 29 months and still have people clamouring for more shows? – it equally unveiled areas that the band could grow into after their long time on the road.

“We’re so lucky to have been able to do that, to have a fanbase so committed to us,” Lewis states, “but the touring kind of felt like a utility thing. We did so much of it without Georgia that it didn’t feel creatively productive.”

Tyler nods: “I would say that it taught us what not to do writing-wise. It made me think about how much we’re going to have to play the music; there was a lot of the ‘Bush Hall’ stuff that was not fun to play, lyrically or musically, over and over again. It was really dramatic and not representative of what we want to do. It was similar to the first album – very quick, reactionary songwriting – it’s good to experience things that you don’t really want to do for very long.”

That’s where ‘Forever Howlong’ comes in. The band make no qualms about the fact that this is a left turn for them, spinning into a world of ethereal storytelling inspired by 1960s/70s folk-rock. Creating a tapestry that has its first stitch in ode to platonic love ‘Besties’, travels through a fable reminiscent of medieval highway robbery in ‘Two Horses’ and finally fades out in swirling dénouement ‘Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)’, ‘Forever Howlong’ is a record that tunes out the melodrama and tells its tales through refined palettes and reimagined ideas.

The band don’t tend to sit still for too long, always on the lookout for the next idea to trigger a gear-change and, subsequently, the next critically acclaimed record. Nonetheless, there are always hints of their past lives, appearing like hot breath on cold glass and vanishing just as quickly. Where the majority of ‘Forever Howlong’ is lighter, airier, taking on loftier tones and more relaxed structural identities, there are still moments of pure theatre, epics such as ‘For the Cold Country’ and ‘Nancy Takes the Night’ that swell and wane in a familiarly operatic manner.

“People think that we always go away and reinvent ourselves, but there’s always connecting sounds, which is why people stick around,” Tyler notes. “I think you can hear what songs were made first, particularly ‘Nancy’, because they’re slightly more attached to the melodramatic end of the spectrum. There’s a range, there’s diversity, there’s something for people who liked us before. Maybe those sounds won’t be there on the next album, and they’ll leave us because there’s nothing left of the oldest thing. It’s just evolution.”

Guitarist Luke Mark agrees: “It’s like a never-ending overlap of circles – a circle of circles!” Lewis adds, “It’s like Colonel Sanders’ mix of 11 secret herbs and spices; keep adding them and eventually you get KFC.” Nobody’s quite sure what that means, but it does strike pretty much to the point of this album: Black Country, New Road are done with making music for other people.

“I don’t think we could have made this album before,” Georgia states.

Lewis continues: “If we’d never released anything before, this could be a deeply uncool record. I think if it wasn’t backed up by the music we’ve already released, we couldn’t have done it; it requires attention and commitment to appreciate it to the highest level, and I think we’ve got a dedicated enough fanbase now that people will do that.”

Everything about this record is a refresh, going right back to the very beginning of the recording process, making the most of being in the studio and almost making an anti-live album.

“It was really fun recording this album,” Georgia smiles. “We had more time in the studio; we were less stressed and pushed.”

“We made the decision from the start that we weren’t going to record it live, so there was no pressure to get the take every time,” Lewis adds. “Doing it all live can be a very rewarding way of doing it, but it creates tension, and honestly, it made me play worse a lot of the time. This time, we were all working really hard, but it was emotionally much more relaxed.”

“There’s definitely something to be gained by all playing live in a room,” Luke advocates. “The energy of that is hard to replicate. We spent a lot of time on each take so that it would be usable if something magical was spread all over it, but I think we had enough separation that all the little, deliberate details could be heard; people had the exact tone that they wanted, they had the space that they needed. It’s always been a compromise before, but this time, everyone got exactly what they wanted.”

The band’s tendency toward the extravagant, whether sonically, lyrically, or in their arrangements, means that there needs to be close collaboration on every idea so that the overall project holds together. Given the aforementioned decision to jolt into a different sonic atmosphere, it was shared inspirations that marked the starting point for Black Country, New Road’s latest evolution.

“It was intentional to have lighter tones on this one, for the most part,” Tyler remembers. “We talked about The Band a lot, particularly the feeling that inspired the rhythmic feel of the album – holding back with the beat, sitting in it, not rushing through to the end. A lot of the music we were listening to at that time was like that.”

Lewis chimes in: “Neil Young always gets a shout, too, especially with how his music blended with LA songwriters. There’s that odd compositional, pop-ish thing that they were doing, writing really catchy songs, and the way they mixed with the rootsy, groovier stuff that The Band were doing.”

Where ‘For the First Time’ and ‘Ants from Up Here’ were more a melting pot of the arty, post-punk Brixton Windmill scene that Black Country, New Road were instrumental in driving back into popularity, ‘Forever Howlong’ is a throwback to a time that even the band’s parents probably don’t remember all that clearly.

At various points, members of the band reference the importance of a handpicked selection of folk-rock singers from the mid-20th century, including Dory Previn, Judee Sill, and Warren Zevon, alongside the staples of Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, and David Bowie. The one name that gets more than a few mentions, though, is Americana legend Randy Newman (aka, the guy who wrote the Toy Story soundtrack).

On the fourth mention of Newman, Luke chuckles. “Honestly, I’ve talked about him in every interview we’ve done for the last couple of weeks! He doesn’t really have a sound, but his influence feels so central to the songwriting, the chords, the instrumentation to an extent. We thought more about the way that the songs are built on this record instead of the stylistic stuff. I’m careful that we don’t become a pastiche act that tries to be fake old and produce our albums in a way that makes it feel like we’re trying to be in 1970; it cheeses me out – before you know it, we’ll all be wearing flares on stage!”

Tyler smiles, “All that 1970s West Coast stuff can be described as sunny or uncool, and it’ll probably put some people off because we didn’t use to sound like that, but we want to have different opinions to people. We want people to not like our music; it’s not healthy for everyone to like everything we do. It’s just how it should be; it’s the natural progression of life.”

Broadening out their influences coincided with a broadening out of responsibilities within the band, with both singing and lyric-writing duties falling on the three heads of Georgia, Tyler, and May. Subsequently, the architectural style of the album ebbs and flows throughout, as these different narrators explore ideas such as the mundanity of modern life (‘Forever Howlong’) and existential dread (‘Happy Birthday’, ‘For the Cold Country’) through lenses mystical and metaphorical.

“I definitely think having different singers makes it more accessible,” Georgia ponders. “It varies more; there’s more choice for people to connect to the band.”

Tyler adds, “Our music used to be so catered towards a specific type of guy, it’s nice to be able to reach out to different people who weren’t previously included in the conversation. It’s a chance for different people to relate to it.”

Even though this technique offers different perspectives, different life experiences, the three writing styles on display merge and blend with such soft edges that at no point is there conflict. Only Black Country, New Road could have an album reference “a walking TikTok trend”, a “metal-clad knight” and someone “dressed like a cow”, and still come out the other end a coherent folk-rock-baroque-pop-rock-opera-post-punk triumph.

Each of the three songs the band describe as “the trilogy” - the three songs that defined the band’s direction of travel for this new era: ‘Besties’, ‘The Big Spin’, and ‘Happy Birthday’ – was written by a different lyricist, and it’s indicative of the band’s adaptability and point-blank refusal to stagnate.

For Lewis, it was the first of the trilogy, ‘The Big Spin’, that sparked to life this new phase, bringing another of many firsts to the fore. “The way it felt to play in the rehearsal room with everyone for the first time, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had playing a new song with everyone. When we play in the pocket, it’s so satisfying because you have these really amazing musicians around you. It’s a different feeling that we haven’t tapped into before; we’ve done big, grand, and emotional, but there’s something about being in the pocket that makes you understand why the 1960s guys were so addicted to it.”

What makes the ‘Forever Howlong’ project even more impressive is that the eleven songs on the record are the only ones written for it, more or less, bucking the trend of bands who whittle songs down from a bank of millions.

“We’re not good enough to do that,” Tyler grins, “but I want to be more like that. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to write a song every week, even bad songs. The trick to being a good songwriter is learning not to be precious. I want to be the kind of songwriter where I have a big bank; I want to be more of a machine. The best way to learn is to fail several times, to avoid anything festering; it’s like not reading a book quickly enough - eventually, you just give up.”

Lewis nods: “We spend so much time on arrangements and making sure every detail is intentional that we don’t get that many songs sounding really good; we don’t see the point going in and recording a song we’re ultimately going to shed anyway. We also can’t write on the road. We tried when we were in the USA, when we were in Europe. Eventually, we just say, ‘Fuck it, let’s just play this song live and figure it out!’”

Having said that, there is one song that nearly found its way onto the album last minute. Far from being a throwaway - it’s hard to imagine any song that comes out of this virtuoso-level group of musicians could accurately be described as such – it instead feeds into the rich (if accidental) Black Country, New Road tradition of keeping a song back for the next chapter.

“We’ve never consciously held a song back,” Luke says, “but we don’t want to create an album with as many songs on it as possible; if you have to force it on, then it clearly isn’t right. This time, we just didn’t have enough time to properly work out the arrangement, and we weren’t going to sacrifice the quality just for the sake of getting it done. What usually happens is that it’ll be a keystone that helps us figure out what we’re going to do next; it’s the seed that blossoms into a new idea.”

“We’ll definitely play it on this tour, too,” Georgia teases.

For now, though, the band are comfortable where they are, transforming off-trend genres and sticking their necks on the line for nostalgia. Where artistic music, in any genre, used to be considered stuffy, inaccessible, perhaps slightly pretentious, Black Country, New Road prove the opposite, injecting fun and spontaneity into their work. Case in point: the album’s title.

“I don’t think any of our album titles have ever really meant anything,” Georgia reflects. “A lot of them come from slipping up and saying something that doesn’t make sense. I remember someone just said ‘forever howlong’ on the day I was writing ‘Besties’, so I thought I’d throw it in. We actually named the album before the title-track, too.”

“We named that super last minute, but it worked really well. The song came from a really mundane day, so it was like, ‘If this is life, forever howlong will it go on?’” Tyler nods.

“All the titles we had for that song at first were really long; I think May originally wanted to call it ‘A Genuinely Lonely Day’ or something, but that’s just a bit heavy!” Luke grins.

For Lewis, the title reinforced the themes and influences of the record, even if it was subconscious at first. “I love the title, it feels like a Steeleye Span album name. I love all those super-60s, folk-rock album names that are just stupid, like ‘All Around My Hat’ or something.”

It’s clear that, for Black Country, New Road, it’s only the opinions of the six people in the band that really matter, and rightly so; nobody ever made worthwhile art by moulding themselves to fit other people’s expectations. That’s why this album is less of a destination, more of a connecting flight to wherever the band end up, a place which is as impossible to define as ever.

“We’re only at the beginning of making something that we want to make,” Tyler reveals, “but I think that’s how it’s going to be forever; we’re never going to be totally satisfied because that’s not how art works, you don’t just stay still.”