The joys of companionship and community

The story of Black Country, New Road is full of surprises and unexpected twists.

- BHANUJ KAPPAL

Formed in 2018, the Cambridge band quickly established itself as one of the most exciting and inventive acts to emerge out of the thriving UK experimental rock scene.

Their 2021 debut album For the First Time was a thrilling melange of nervy, angular post-punk guitar, swirling post-rock textures and carnivalesque Klezmer flourishes, all anchored by frontman Isaac Wood's wounded sprechgesang. It was a mercurial, free-wheeling record that veered between paranoia, mania and cheeky self-derision—on Science Fair, the band jokingly refers to themselves as "the world's second best Slint tribute act."

For their sophomore album, 2022's Ants from up There, the band jettisoned post-punk's ironic detachment in favour of the sincere sentimentality of mid-2000s emo. The debut album's murky cloud of post-industrial unease gave way to alt-folk waltzes, baroque art-pop ballads and free-jazz freakouts, as Wood sang of heartbreak and social isolation with self-lacerating honesty and cinematic melodrama. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece that pushed the boundaries of what rock music could sound like, the 2020s' answer to classics like Radiohead's OK Computer and Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane over the Sea. Black Country, New Road were all set to become the biggest new thing in rock.

And then, four days before the album dropped, Wood announced that he was leaving the band due to his struggles with mental health. The aforementioned reference to Slint on their first record, meant as a joke, now started to sound a little prophetic. In 1991, ahead of the release of Slint's genre-defining masterpiece