Besties

There’s more BC,NR incoming: Brother, if you are still really into sprechgesang, go listen to the new Squid album.

Three weeks ago, the beacons were lit, the sirens began blaring into the night, and ‘Committee of Affairs’ got a new TikTok sound to play with. In other words, there is a Black Country, New Road record approaching from the middle distance. It’s always interesting when a universally acclaimed band debuts new stuff to mixed reviews, but stick around, if the Cambridge-via-London sextet can manage to harness this new record’s purported influences, we could be in for something special.

‘Besties’ is the name of the new track, and it finds the band stretching the sounds they discovered on 2023’s Live at Bush Hall to new ends. Played in by harpsichord, the group’s latest offering is a Georgia Ellery fronted ode to the friendship shared by the women in the band – all three of whom are sharing vocal duties across their incoming LP Forever Howlong, due on April 4. ‘Besties’ is the first release by the band with Ellery’s voice as her principal instrument, and Jockstrap fans playing along at home are well accustomed to just how powerful and alluring this instrument is.

‘Besties’ is odd to me. I was counting down the minutes until its release, making my way through the 15-dollarest chicken burger I could find at 1:30 in the morning in penance to Greenwich Mean Time. On first listen I hated it, I hated myself and I hated my favourite band ever for releasing something I was so strongly repulsed by. The drums were washed out in the mix, the mandolin noodling felt out of place, and the lead lines on the sax were scratchy and a step too far removed from the melody. It was worse than bad, it was annoying.

At that point it was everything grating, but ‘Besties’ has grown on me.

The day following the single’s release I saw the same old shitpost saying that BC,NR should ‘go back to making gooner music’. You can set your watch to ‘Sunglasses’-pilled redditor stans spitting the dummy any time the band takes a step further away from the music and lyrics of ‘For the First Time’. This kind of lusting after the earliest iterations of the band’s sound is always curious to me, no matter how much I love those albums’ klezmer-tinged soundtracks to stenographic records of bad nights. Maybe people are so attached to the Wood era because it was about two years ahead of the curve in its hyper and meta-referentiality and ironic detachment (buzzword!). Only God can forgive the gooner band if they change their art in a way which forces the youth demographic to sincerely feel.

At risk of going over incredibly well-trodden ground, frontman and primary lyricist Isaac Wood leaving the band on the eve of the release of Ants from Up There was a sucker punch, it’s a damn shame one of the best songwriters in recent memory isn’t releasing music anymore. RIP Isaac Wood era BC,NR, you would’ve loved Cameron Winter’s ‘The Rolling Stones’. As a final word to the shitposters, brother, if you are still really into sprechgesang, go listen to the new Squid album, it’s pretty good.

Habitually, lyrics are the first thing I listen for, which is what got me down about ‘Besties’ at the jump, particularly because of how much I enjoy Ellery’s writing for Jockstrap. To me, the line ‘I’m a walking TikTok trend’, and perhaps even the title itself, run the track Wile E. Coyote-style into the same problem movies from the 90s do when a character pulls out a cell phone — there’s no way it’ll age well.

That being said, the sound the band is reaching for meshes well with a track about how much you love your friends, and transposing the stylings of The Band (reportedly among the key inspirations for Forever Howlong) to heaters about growing as musicians and people surely cannot fail in the long run. While there is still a place for it on any listening schedule, I think the interiority and individualism of early BC,NR has had its day, as another album about feeling paralyzingly alone would betray just how fast and how well the band has had to evolve.

Therefore, I’m very excited about the new record. Those lucky enough to catch the band on tour last year will be familiar with six of the remaining unreleased songs, which are all as high octane as relatively low octane music can be. For what it’s worth, ‘Nancy Tries to Take the Night’, track nine on the incoming album, is one of my favourite songs the band has ever put together – the live versions with Ichiko Aoba are nothing short of heavenly.

I’m effectively saying that, if ‘Besties’ isn’t your cup of tea, there’s a hot chance something else will tickle your fancy on the new album. BC,NR are pulling from all corners in their inspirations for project four, and we know because we have apparent real-time trackers of the key inspirations to each member of the band during the making of their projects.

I am of course referring to the band’s First, Second, and Third and now Fourth Ever Playlists. Famously, the band stated in press for the first records that pop music was the only common thread between their tastes – reflected in the peppering of cuts from Pop 2 and Emotion, When We Fall Asleep… and SOUR in the first three ever playlists. But on number four (somewhat) in place of pop queens there is a pronounced throughline of Americana and folk, with acts like Emmylou Harris, The Band, Peggy Seeger, and Dorothy Previn contributing prominently to the weight of the playlist’s 8-hour catalog. 

In comparing this fourth playlist to its forebears, you start to build your own patchwork of what the new record is going to be through a barrage of questions. Questions like, how can Warren Zevon’s sound possibly mix with Joanna Sternberg’s; are we going to get mid-track sax solos a la ‘All to You’ by Ellen McIlwaine; and is this record just going to sound like the Ugly EP from last year but bigger? 

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I do have a second source for my bloated self-indulgence about four minutes of available music: Blue Harbour, the radio show of Lewis Evans, BC,NR’s resident wind-wielder, and Jack Young, a bloke that sells wine I guess. The show has just turned one, and it’s fascinating to observe how the average Blue Harbour tracklist is lockstep with the music influencing Forever Howlong.

The pro forma of the average Blue Harbour episode is simple: jangly guitar music is interspersed between cries of “BAAAAAHSH” (bosh), shithousery inspired by British television presenters of yore, and making fun of bald blokes. The actual program itself is enough of a pastiche of podcasting and university/community radio to be enjoyable, but the songs the boys play obviously take centre stage.

Central to the Blue Harbour oeuvre are bands from the stables of labels like Flying Nun and Drag City – groups like The Clean, The Bats, Silver Jews, and solo acts like Will Oldham and Bill Callahan. Essentially, if you have heard of Guided by Voices you will most likely enjoy the show. Fair warning, I do often have to listen to coke raps after an episode to cleanse my palate.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that I like and care about this band too much, they may as well have baby-birded their influences down my gullet in shaping my taste as it stands currently. I’m not kidding about this, most of what I consider my ‘good’ picks for our On Rotation series here at Redshift are ripped straight from Blue Harbour and the n-th Ever Playlists. I, therefore, am a lost cause and my opinions should not be trusted, but the upcoming record is drawing from places that are intensely interesting and left-field for a post-punk-cum-art-rock band.

As I see it, at worst we’re going to get 80s Dylan, and we got ‘Jokerman’ out of that. Forever Howlong is bound to alienate the old hands and For the first time factionalists, but to those prepared to walk into the fire, I will see you on April 4.

Oliver O’Brien

27 February 2025