Black Country, New Road - For the First Time

Pitchfork 74

Read Jazz Monroe’s review of the album.

The Guardian 0

(Ninja Tune)
Showing a joyful disregard for genre, this remarkably biodiverse seven-piece take the rock band format and soar with it

Unprecedented times or not, few will have foreseen that one of the best albums of 2021 would have combined the post-rock of early 90s cult band Slint with klezmer music and harrowing references to Bruce Springsteen and NutriBullets. Thesauruses have been worn out trying to describe this London-via-Cambridge seven-piece’s unholy marriage of intense, long-form guitar work and incandescent saxophone. Ultimately, Black Country, New Road push the “rock band” format as far as bands like Radiohead do.

There are a mere six tracks on their debut album. Two – Sunglasses and Athens, France – have been re-recorded from their previously released iterations to reflect many months of hard touring in which this fledgling punk orchestra (some conservatoire-trained, some self-taught) fully took wing. If the interplay between the band’s instruments makes gleeful mincemeat of genre, singing guitarist Isaac Wood’s equally remarkable lyrics regularly float to the top of the mix. Half-spoken, half-sung, they riff on granular scene references (“I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi”) and Gen-Z witticisms, but pack in plenty of timeless tenderness and anomie.