Black Country, New Road
Nevermore Hall, July 3rd, 2026
Oh, contrarianism! Just one way to finally get around to listening to Black Country, New Road — definitely not the ideal way, but a pathway nonetheless. But that’s how it was for me. Because for years I’d seen blog-laudings and the frankly gripping cover art of their first record but hadn’t got around to actually listening to it, and upon the release of their most recent, Forever Howlong, I found myself thinking, “gee, what a little cutie-pie!” upon glancing the weird little red dude who encompasses its sleeve, sketched in thick layers of paint and beholding a little green starburst in his palm. I’d think of him again when, imagine my luck, an article I’d happened upon regarding a completely different group referred to said record as ‘disappointing’. “But it can’t be ‘disappointing’,” I thought. “He’s just so adorable.”
So I listened, and lo and behold, by the very middle of the record’s frenetic harpsichord introduction my brain had become a freight train: “Oh, I absolutely love this.” And the momentum didn’t stop — I was dazzled by Forever Howlong’s beauty, its melancholy, its poetry, its invention and the true, articulate meaning of its songs. Not many things are so illuminating as experiencing fantastic music with no expectations and being left so spellbound. I can think of one rival after having seen the group the other week, though, and that would be seeing their singer and keyboardist May Kershaw perfectly pound out that intro with the precision of a stitch-gifting war nurse.
Not that Black Country, New Road, whose sound is a curious sort of experimental-folk grab-bag, aren’t used to doing things that would make people turn their heads and shut their mouths. For example, many music journalists would probably try to twist the venerable Tom Jones into a self-explanatory joke, but these young lads and lasses from Cambridge, England walk off stage to “What’s New, Pussycat?” (They walked on to Tom Petty’s “American Girl”, while artists such as Scott Walker and Janis Ian filtered through the speakers of Baltimore’s Nevermore Hall on July 3rd as the crowd gathered and sweated.)
The group also have spent the last few years joining the ranks of AC/DC and Faith No More as a rare rock-phoenix success story. Most other groups, upon losing their frontmen, are unable to sustain themselves beyond cult curiosity — see the Doors, Big Brother. But when Isaac Wood left the Black Country to forage a path of his own, his ex-bandmates were somehow able to keep up the momentum they built on another perfect record, their second, Ants From Up There. It wasn’t a smooth journey; on their Live at Bush Hall record, recorded just under a year after Wood’s departure, Miss Tyler Hyde’s voice was noticeably frail. But their willingness to be so vulnerable — they refuse to play their early songs — paid off, and by this most recent stateside tour, all three vocalists — Hyde (who also plays bass guitar), Kershaw, and violinist Georgia Ellery — were all in top shape, strong and unabashed.
Throughout the night, instruments would be traded off; a few songs, only requiring two or three musicians, let the others to sit or squat and swig down the even-more-necessary-than-usual water; saxophonist Lewis Evans would do a few kicks in the air in time to the beautiful music without missing a note. The vast majority of their set drew from Forever Howlong, incorporating all of its standout tracks — “Socks”, “Nancy Tries to Take the Night”, “For the Cold Country”; set closer “Happy Birthday” was perchance the most important. Each sounded just as essential as its studio equivalent, only bolstered by the inherent imperfection of the stage; “Mary”, their harrowingly beautiful ballad, was particularly enthralling, and only “Two Horses”, their cowboy number, let me down a bit, as its sound for some reason lacked the fullness of the rest of their performance — though it did have me thinking again: “How great would these guys sound with an orchestra?”
All these songs tell stories — dynamic, near-operatic stories of love, loss, or those furious little flares of emotion you get while walking down the street. Each has a wholeness to it that is is surprising in a time where many groups of note seem to attract attention less for the quality of their body of material and more for how they exist within culture. How a band got a record deal, what school its members attended, and who their parents are; what clothes a female performer wears, where she got them, and how easy they are for audience members to replicate — these things seem infinitely more important as to whether or not the music itself is actually worth listening to. One of the most remarkable things about Black Country, New Road, on the other hand, is the fact that in so many of their press photos, they look like slacker college students you’d see walking down the street!
Their constructed ‘image’ relies more so, then, on not just their masterful album covers but their ability to convey emotional images through their songs, something many groups nowadays simply do not do. I was reading in an old interview, a news clipping regarding a very good Roger Daltrey solo record that could be described as a slab of post-Who-breakup-moodiness. The great interpreter articulated his thoughts as to why, in his mind, rock music had entered a slumping state in the mid-eighties; obviously biased, he reasoned that it was because new groups were too reliant on self-composed material over covers. He has a great point: all those sixties and seventies groups we laud today as belonging to some imagined ‘golden age’ all honed their craft on the contents of personal canons — a process that, when successful, imbues an aspiring songwriter with experiential knowledge of what makes a good song, aiding them in writing their own future-classics in due time.
I couldn’t help but think of this newsbyte, however optimistically, as I watched the group’s opener, Horsegirl. An all-young-woman trio out of Chicago, the group specializes in about two genres of song: there are the dreamy car-window-wind kick-marchers, and then there are those numbers which one could dance to — muffled-noise-from-indoors back-alley-at-dusk makout session songs. They’re atmospheric most certainly, and their nineties-slacker clothes combined with the cozy-tiny-ness of how the stage was setup for them — a big blackness surrounding them as the headliners’ instruments lay dormant in the background — made me feel like I was in the studio audience of Night Music a week out from Sonic Youth or Bongwater, despite me sitting in the bleacher-style arrangement on the balcony basically the entire time because the aforementioned heat had left me totally pooped.
But by the end of Horsegirl’s set, I was disappointed; many of their songs rely too much on said atmosphere, choosing ultimately unsatisfying motorik repetition over structure. Too, their lyrics were incomprehensible almost all of the time, meaning I wasn’t able to latch onto what stories they may have been telling. That is not to say the sonic landscape they were building does not have great potential, of course. Both them and Black Country, New Road seem very aware of the ability of music to do such a thing, with the latter themselves incorporating a cover into the set; from Black Country’s self-proclaimed “world” we detoured, and we soon found ourselves embedded in a meeting of “the Big Star Fan Club” with a fabulous rendition of “The Ballad of El Goodo”. It was everything a cover should be: recognizable yet utterly its own, assimilated perfectly into Black Country’s tuneful borough.
There was also a number from Live At Bush Hall, while “Strangers”, their recent single benefitting the War Child charity, opened their set. There was one point where one of the group — I believe guitarist Luke Mark? — told the crowd that they couldn’t believe anyone showed up given the ridiculous heatwave, that there were plenty of water bottles to go around, and they were willing to stop the show should anyone need help. They don’t embarrass themselves in public in futile vies for attention. They truly care about people and are extremely grateful to be where they are now.
They also say that, should their previous frontman choose to join them once more, he’s more than welcome back into the family. But Black Country, New Road as it exists today simply does not need him anymore. I will admit it was gratifying to see three multitalented young women up there in their actually quite stylish clothes — I was particularly taken by Tyler Hyde’s white knee-highs — singing shockingly timeless music in the middle of a supposedly timely time. And there is an utterly striking difference between, say, Isaac Wood’s yelling in “Sunglasses” and Georgia Ellery’s smooth, slipped-in delivery of “I’m a walking TikTok trend, but the color runs out in the end” as “Besties” wraps up. It is impressive that a group these days can sing about modern things in a manner that isn’t distracting or drowning in irony, qualities that were unfortunately all over that first record of theirs. Thankfully Wood would get over it for their second, paving the way for the new-New Road’s embrace of the world for all that it is, cupping it in their hands and letting it brim with every searing color, winking at it without ever becoming unwelcoming. Yes, they’re still young and hopped up, but they take their craft seriously and don’t seem to have any inhibitions about it, and their current posture certainly isn’t wrapped up in some grandiose debbie-downer metaphor. You don’t need one if your back is truly straight, and a straight back is timeless, and maybe someday someone will mistranscribe the lyric above as “tick-tock”, and the message will remain exactly the same: poseurs are breathing time-bombs.