Two days before Black Country, New Road's second album Ants From Up There was due to be released in 2022, frontman Isaac Wood announced he was leaving the band, citing mental health reasons. The album dropped as planned. It was, and remains, extraordinary — one of the most celebrated indie rock records of its decade. The remaining six members faced a simple question: now what?
Forever Howlong, the 2025 follow-up and their first album without Wood, is the answer. It is not what anyone expected, which is part of what makes it work. The band did not pivot to a different genre. They did not hire a similar frontman. They distributed the vocals across the group, changed the arrangements to accommodate six distinct voices, and made an album that sounds like nothing so much as a small community figuring out how to keep going.
Georgia Ellery's lead contributions are the album's most striking element: her voice is entirely different from Wood's, and she brings a warm, slightly folk-inflected quality to songs that might otherwise have leaned on post-rock grandeur. Lewis Evans' saxophone, which was always part of the BC,NR sound, takes on new prominence. Tyler Hyde's bass is more melodically active. The band sounds like it's playing together rather than behind a vocalist.
The album is not perfect — there are moments where the loss of Wood's lyrical specificity is felt as an absence — but Forever Howlong is a remarkable document: proof that a band can survive a crisis by being honest about it. The title has the resigned acceptance of a question that's stopped being a question.
On their summer North American tour, with Horsegirl in tow, BC,NR will play rooms sized for a band that has genuinely moved its audience. That's what they've managed: to keep the audience, and grow it, through honesty and adaptation. Grade: A-.