Foto-© Eddie Whelan

Das lang erwartete, am Freitag erscheinende neue Album Forever Howling von Black Country, New Road wurde von James Ford (von Simian Mobile Disco, der u.a. bereits mit Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Blur oder zuletzt Fontaines D.C. zusammenarbeitete) produziert und zeigt Black Country, New Road in einer neuen Form, in der die Gesangsaufgaben – und der Großteil des Songwritings – zwischen Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery und May Kershaw aufgeteilt sind. Es folgt auf das große Durchbruchs-Album Ants From Up There aus 2022, das gleichzeitig auch kurz nach der Veröffentlichung den Ausstieg des vorherigen Songwriters und Masterminds Isaac Wood mit sich brachte. Das bedeutete auch, dass kurz nachdem die Fans die neuen Songs kennengelernt hatten, diese nie wirklich live aufgeführt wurden. Die Band schüttelte sich kurz und setzte neu an – man wollte nicht mit dem vorherigen Material auf Tour gehen und testete kurzerhand neue Songs live – um jetzt endlich mit einem neuen Studioalbum aufzuwarten. Wir sprachen vorab mit Georgia Ellery und Lewis Evans über das neue Album, wie ein normaler Tag als Black Country, New Road-Mitglied aussieht und vieles mehr – unser Interview!

How are you doing?
Lewis Evans: Good, Very, good. It’s a beautiful, sunny day.

I want to start by asking about the band you are these days. You are quite a hard band to catch in words. I was thinking, would you consider yourselves a rock band?
Lewis Evans: There’s rocky elements, definitely. It’s a bit more folky now, probably maybe a bit poppy, but it’s a bit of a melting pot at the moment.

I mainly asked the question because Wikipedia says so promptly: “Black Country, New Road is a rock band”, and I found it listening to your latest record, a little bit almost ridiculous, in a good way. The new record loses a lot of the rocky elements. I was wondering, what does an average day being a member of BCNR look like?
Georgia Ellery: Some of us get up early. Some of us get up late. You’ve got an early riser, Lewis. You’ve got late riser, me. Next week, we’re going to be rehearsing. We start rehearsal at 10am actually. Sometimes, some of us are, like, quarter of an hour late. And then we’ll rehearse, and we’ll have a long lunch afterwards at the rehearsal studios café, that we love because they know us in there, and the food is really good, and people are really great. So shout out to the cafe. And then chill for the afternoon, work on songs, if there are songs to be worked on in London. That’s what we do in London. Yeah, can you add, Lewis? Is there anything else that we would do?
Lewis Evans: No, not particularly.
Georgia Ellery: Probably we go to the cinema in the evening. We all like going to the movies.
Lewis Evans: When we’re on tour, obviously a combination of travel and gigs, but also, we usually like to do some stuff, like eat local, drink local, do some slightly weirder stuff in the local area. I don’t know. We like to try and do as much as possible when we’re touring, or at least do one weird thing in every place, you go to.

And what’s the weirdest thing that comes to mind?
Lewis Evans: Riding on the back of the moped in Indonesia. That was something we really wanted to do, or at least I really wanted to. Yeah, really scary. And the guy could tell we were scared, so he went around the corners way faster than he usually would. There’s definitely some weird stuff, that we’ve done. We ate stinky tofu in Taiwan, that was grim, and everyone was laughing at us in the in the restaurant. You know, you’ve got to try these things.

I want to move on to the new album, because, well, it’s been a little while since you made a studio album, and I read in preparation, that you said in an interview that after the release of Ants From Up There you were considering making a film score with an orchestra for the next album. Now this is no soundtrack, obviously, but I was still wondering whether you could describe the film that you’re scoring on this album?
Georgia Ellery: It’s not really like a concept album, more a collection of songs, so maybe it’s like a day in the life film of like six different people, and they’re all going about their days, and maybe some of them hang out and have a coffee. Well, I guess not all of the songs are like daily life, but all songs are quite different. If you have these characters and they’re all going through very different lives, maybe that’s what I was imagining. And it jumps back in time as well, and all over the planet, yeah.

You’ve had to reinvent yourselves after Ants From Up There, with the departure of Isaac Wood, and you did so quite rapidly. One thing I noticed is a shift towards more upbeat music, and you’ve got an album cover to match this stone. Can you tell me a little bit about how this album cover came to be?
Lewis Evans: Yeah, it’s an artist called Jordan Key who Luke followed on Instagram, and well you know, the thing that we’re good at as a band is writing songs and playing them well live. Something that we’ve often struggled with is making decisions like album covers, names of the record, stuff that is not necessarily all of our fortes, but it’s stuff that we all feel passionate about, some things cringe us out, but we don’t always know why. So, I was really worried about this process. I figured finding the cover was going to be really stressful, because we’ve got all our songs, they’re sounding great, but how the hell are we all going to agree on an album cover? But Luke followed this guy, and he put it on the chat, and everyone was like, oh yeah, love that one. And everyone just loved it. And it was like, oh my god, we found an album cover. Let’s lock it in. And so we got in contact with him, lovely guy from Portland in America, and he’s, yeah, he’s a skateboarder and painter, which is a lot of fun. But yeah, he was really lovely too. I mean, all we did was ask to buy his painting, so he’s done all the work. So yeah, he’s lovely.

It’s a very funny album cover. I can imagine it indeed also fitting on a skate t-shirt very well. Then I was really taken by the harmonies on the sixth track, Mary, especially at the section where you burst out all three together “she screams in the shower – lost all her power”. Can you talk me through the making of this song?
Georgia Ellery: Well, this song was inspired by the Roches album, and we wanted to have a song, where we all sung in harmony all the way through, even if we were singing in unison. And we, when we came to record it, we recorded it in one room all together as well. I think, we did only a couple of takes just for different amounts, varying amounts of energy for that exact bit. We were really going for it. It was amazing to record that. And yeah, not feel too precious about it, just making sure you, like, capture the right emotion. And then there, you know, you can hear, or at least I can hear a bit, where I go up a bit too sharp. But I like that. I like that little detail of kind of roughness, because it’s like you weren’t thinking about perfection. You were thinking about the trying to be in the moment, and it sounding raw.

It definitely does, and I really love it. The whole album has a little bit of a feel to it, like it was a record made in the 70s, that you then found in the back of the bin at the record shop, but it has been lost to time, and that it maybe has this cult following. And these songs are really what make the album stand out in a way. Another song that does a similar thing is the title track Forever Howling for which I believe you had to also do some recorder lessons. Can you talk me through the writing of this song?
Lewis Evans: May came to the rehearsal room with this incredible song, and it was just her and the piano and we were like, well, how the fuck are we gonna play this as a band? But the sentiment of it felt right for us. Something about the song felt like it was gonna work with other stuff, that we had for the record. So we were like: Let’s use it, but we gotta do something about it. And then May said, that she originally envisioned the arrangement being six clarinets, and I immediately got alarm bells of that, because I’m a wind player and I’m a good saxophonist at the best of times. But clarinet player, it’s so hard, and the idea of everyone having to learn the clarinet was just like a bit of a nightmare.

So I’d been listening to Joanna Newsome in that week when we were doing this song. And I actually can’t remember what the name of the song is, but it’s on maybe Divers or Ys, I can’t remember, but there’s a song where there’s like a whole section where there’s just recorders layered up on top of each other. Sounds very renaissancy, and I thought, well, that could be a good alternative. And it’s a really lovely sound. It almost sounds like a pipe organ when they’re all played together, and when they’re all really flat, it almost sounds like an organ. And I thought that could be a good alternative, and that would be easy enough for us all to learn. And so we kind of decided to commit to it. We bought six tenor recorders, because tenor recorder was in the correct range for us to be able to play and May sing as comfortably as possible within her vocal range. And a friend of mine, a friend of the band, Gabriel Julie, who’s not credited, he’s thanked on the back of the record, he came over to my house that day and we all came over and we basically went through an arrangement with him, and he just kept changing everyone’s mouth positions, or, like, moving our fingers around and making sure we’re all playing really perfectly, because he’s like, an amazing recorder player. Plays a lot of, like, baroque recorder music and so we had him there for the day as kind of like an on site, you know, consultant or record consultant. We fleshed out this arrangement of May’s amazing piece of music. And the arrangement starts off very simple, because we weren’t very good at the recorders when we started the song. And the further through the song you get, the more complex the arrangement gets, because we all got better at the recorder, which is quite a fun way to look back on it, because, you know, it shows our progression, our ability and recorders. And now we’re playing them all live. It’s another great way to get a break on the record, like Mary gives you a little beat to, like, think and to reflect on what you’ve had, because it’s less loud than all the other songs. So, yeah, so that’s the story of that one.

It speaks, probably to my personality, that I really like the two break songs on there, as you call them. Those were the two real highlights for me. I read that your producer, James Ford, has worked 16 hour days to complete this album, and well, the result is also there to match. I can imagine that someone, not just spending so much time, but all this effort, must make you feel quite blessed. What do you think is his biggest influence on this album?
Georgia Ellery: Oh, good question. There’s the sound of it. He was particular about snare sounds, I remember. He’s a drummer and multi-instrumentalist, but mainly a drummer. So yeah and getting the sounds of the instruments, he knew exactly how to get it right. I was after a particular violin sound, I don’t know whether it’s what people imagine violin sounding like on records, but I kind of like to have the clarity of the instrument in here, or the not squeaks, but the texture of it, because I guess that’s what I hear acoustically, and that’s what I want to hear on a record. English folky violins sound quite flat and kind of muted, and they got those sorts of texture sounds, kind of gotten rid of because they’re not desirable or something. But I said: I kind of want it to sound real. So, we tried all these different microphone pairings, it’s like two microphones on it, and he was able to get it how I wanted. Yeah, I haven’t really been in a situation where I’ve been able to ever get what I was after. So he was a master facilitator, wasn’t he?
Lewis Evans: I kind of feel like every reference we threw at him, he A knew it, and B knew exactly how to create that, which is astonishing, really. We came at it in terms of how he wanted it to sound from lots of different angles. And he kind of managed to make that happen for us, which is really special, yeah. So I guess that for me, that feels like the main thing he brought to it, but he also brought, like, incredible hard work and determination. He’s a master

You seem very much a band that is in love with each other as much as I’ve ever seen a band be. You had the Up Song (from the last Live album) where you declare love to each other, and this album starts with Besties. This seems to me a red line of the band, but I was wondering, you are now handling the songwriting in tandem, doing it as a group, and you sing the lead with three women now. I believe you consider this to be a healthy competition. Are you ever inclined to include subtle stabs or like a slight diss towards the other on an album, and can we hear that on this album as well?
Lewis Evans: Love that question.
Georgie Ellery: Let’s see, do the people want to hear more disses?

I don’t know, they’ve got Kendrick Lamar for that, usually. Maybe it’s like a musical moment that I’m looking for where one of you is playing deliberately better on the same instrument just to rub it in the other’s face or something. Can imagine that this is the kind of thing that you would be inclined to do when you spend so much time together as a band.
Georgia Ellery: Well Okay, there’s one moment. So at the end of Socks, the little piano outro is May and Tyler both playing on the piano. They’re like, battling. That’s as far as our fights currently go. But it is a really nice playful moment where the instruction was like, have a battle
Lewis Evans: They end up actually playing together really beautifully in that moment, which is funny. But I also think that, you know, there’s definitely an element of, like, slight piss taking at points. I understand what you mean. Like, you might play a bit more silly on a song of someone else’s that maybe you wouldn’t want to have on your own song. Sort of your party moments like you might have. You might have a moment where you like, put in a silly thing that everyone likes, but you wouldn’t appreciate that if someone played that on your song, you know? I mean, yeah, I’m sure that happens. I don’t want to put words into gum out there, but, you know…
Georgia Ellery: I don’t know. I don’t know whether I’ve done that on this record. I think it’s like serving the song is the most important. I don’t really feel the need for irony in my playing. To be honest, at this point.
Lewis Evans: It’s harder to be ironic on mandolin as well. I think, can you play irony on the mandolin?

Eye rolling mandolin playing, that would be something, yeah.
Lewis Evans: Oh, easy. So I don’t think it’s possible.
Georgia Ellery: Yeah, I mean, I was like fucking it up a little bit in the recorders.

Well, I couldn’t tell, at least. I’ve seen your Amoeba “What’s In My Back” video, and it is clear to me that you have a very wide palette of influences on display. I was wondering, what is the wildest influence that people can hear in your latest album?
Lewis Evans: JoJo Siwa, maybe.
Georgia Ellery: Yeah, there’s a healthy dose of JoJo Siwa.
Lewis Evans: I don’t know. Like, I’d say probably people would be most surprised to hear the inspiration from current day pop music. We do listen to lots of modern pop music. I don’t know. I feel like we’re wearing our influences on our sleeve on this record. So maybe there’s not going to be too many surprises. What do you think? You think that there’s influences, that maybe we wouldn’t expect?

I don’t know. I found it to be quite frank. The first time I listened to the album, I was very unsure, what I was listening to. It took me a while to get into it, and then it started to grow. I’m also still very much even after four times of listening to it, in an exploration phase of the music. But, like I said, it does sound like something, that has been lost to time. And so I found, that the influences, that I don’t know, are on there very much, the cult bands from back in the day, that are very niche if you know them. And that’s very good, by the way. It’s a unique sounding experience for all these qualities. And well, continuing on that, you are quite an experimental band, clearly, and so it sounds…looking back, what is the worst musical experiment that you’ve almost put out in the world.
Lewis Evans: I think we definitely did jamming, when we shouldn’t have been doing jamming. And if it weren’t for us realizing that it didn’t work, we could have been making much worse music than we do. That’s the thing I would have been most embarrassed about looking back on if we’d have put out any jam music.
Georgia Ellery: We also did that orchestral version of track x. It never came out.
Lewis Evans
Yeah, yeah, track x, it just didn’t work, did it? It was not up to scratch, though. The reverb in the room made it really difficult to hear, so everyone kind of played there deaf.
Georgia Ellery: The idea was really lovely, but unfortunately, the execution was not quite there.

I’ve got one last question. What genres or forms of art or whatever would you like to explore with BCNR in the future?
Lewis Evans: I’d love to do a power pop record. I would absolutely love to do, like a Big Star teenage band, club style, like a fucking Ripper of a record. I think that would be so cool, and I think we’d do a good job of that, but I don’t know how into that everyone would be, because we probably have to only have guitar, base, drums and vocals, so we wouldn’t be able to explore the musical depth, we usually get to. So maybe that’d be more of an offshoot band that we could do.

Is there space for the ironic mandolin on there?
Lewis Evans: Yeah, there should be. That’s kind of music, that I really like at the moment.
Georgia Ellery: I can’t think of a style of music. I’m like, I just really enjoy seeing what comes out of everyone, and that kind of natural thing, just kind of seeing where everyone’s at and everyone’s wanting to make..
Lewis Evans: Yeah, it does happen really naturally. Because I think after we did the second album, that was the music that I was listening to. And then I never thought that I’d be really into like Fairport Convention in 2022 but now I am really into Fairport Convention, and that comes through the music a lot, and so I’m sure in a couple of years time, when we’re doing another record, I’ll be into a new strain of music. And we will all be into new strains of music, that will be inspiring the music that we make. So it’s hard to tell. I’m sure it will be different to what we’re doing now.

Do you ever have that music that you’re very much into at the moment is in disjoint with the music you have to put out when you’re performing live? Is that something that happens?
Lewis Evans: Yes, with the first album, none of us were really listening to that kind of music at all, but because of COVID, we still released it. And yeah, that was weird.

Thank you very much for this interview. It was a lovely talk.

Black Country, New Road live:
14.10.2025 Gloria, Köln
15.10.2025 Astra, Berlin
21.10.2025 Mojo, Hamburg