BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD TAKE A TURN INTO THE LEFTFIELD.
IT IS ONE thing to have interesting and unusual musical ideas. It is quite another to have the chops to back them up. Enter Black Country, New Road, seven schoolfriends from Cambridge who are emerging as one of the most exciting bands of Britain’s experimental new breed.
Over metronomic rhythms and subdued guitars forever threatening to break out into ferocious noise, violinist Georgia Ellery and saxophonist Lewis Evans overlay klezmer and gypsy jazz melodies while frontman Isaac Wood imparts, in breathy, slightly desperate tones, vignettes on the modern experience. “I am invincible in my sunglasses. There are so many road men on this street and you cannot tell that I am scared,” is one of the many memorable lines from the band’s second single, Sunglasses.
“Georgia spent her teens playing in klezmer bands, Lewis would go on youth camps where people played their country’s traditional music, and May [Kershaw, keyboards] is deeply steeped in classical,” says bassist Tyler Hyde, currently juggling commitments to a smoking hot band with her final year studying at Manchester School Of Art. “All three of them are studying at the Guildhall, and I played a lot of classical guitar when I was younger. But the sound of the band actually comes from jamming, and getting to a point where we can agree on something.”
“Charlie [Wayne, drums], Luke [Mark, guitar] and I are from the untutored world of sitting in your bedroom and learning your favourite songs on guitar,” pipes in Isaac Wood, who nonetheless is also at the Guildhall, studying computer music.
Since forming in 2018, Black Country, New Road have been part of a creative, post-punk-dominated scene centring on the Windmill, the flat-roofed pub in Brixton that’s become an unlikely breeding ground for Britain’s latest wave of noisy virtuosos, kindred spirits Black Midi among them. “It’s such a welcoming space that you feel you can take chances,” says Hyde. “You can develop your sound.”
Meanwhile, Wood – recently described in MOJO as “my current favourite lyricist” by Underworld’s Karl Hyde, father of bassist Tyler – has been developing his unique lyrical style, in which he reveals things the average 21-year-old might want to keep hidden. Debut single Athen’s, France, for example, details a disastrous, unconsummated sexual encounter with an Ariana Grande fan. “I’m yet to have any explicitly sexual experiences, but I one day hope to and Athen’s, France was simply my imagining what could happen,” claims Wood. “The scariest moment is when I present the lyrics to the band. I’m always worried I’ve exposed myself in some horrible way.”
None of this sounds like an obvious recipe for success. Yet there is something so vibrant and inspiring about Black Country, New Road, that every gig is now a happening. “We’re overwhelmed by the reaction,” says Hyde. “It isn’t so strange that people like experimental music, but it is strange to play the Green Man festival and see so many kids getting into it.”
“Live music is growing as a reaction to the domination of online life, and we’re benefiting from that,” says Isaac Wood. Then he concludes, with a line that will probably soon be a lyric in a Black Country, New Road song: “There’s only so much time you can spend playing horribly violent video games.”
“I’m always worried I’ve exposed myself in some horrible way.” ISAAC WOOD