Black Country, New Road

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It was recently announced that Isaac Wood, co-founder and frontman of Black Country, New Road, had left the band. Forthcoming tour dates were also cancelled. However, the band is continuing as a six-piece, and festival performances that were already planned will still take place “It's going to be an entirely new set of music,” says Lewis Evans. “Nothing played from albums one or two.”
It marks the end of another chapter of the group as they reconfigure and move forward without Wood, leaving the work they completed as a seven- piece on those two recordings. The most recent of those recordings, February’s “Ants From Up There”, landed nearly exactly a year from their Mercury Prize-nominated debut “For The First Time”, and saw not only further critical acclaim but the band reaching no.3 in the Official Albums Chart.

“It just didn't seem right to play these tracks,” says Charlie Wayne. “They are songs that are written by seven people and they're meant to be performed by seven people. If we're not playing as seven people then we're not going to be performing them. We're still making music that sounds like Black Country, New Road that is as strong as anything that we've played previously, it's just different. We wouldn't be playing these shows over summer if we didn't have any confidence in the music. The stuff we're playing is wicked.”
The band will move forward without a core singer or front person. “We're trying to switch up the vocal roles as much as possible,” says Evans. “We're trying to mix up who sings and on what songs. So we're just going to see what happens.”
“It's obviously a shame that we can't tour the second album when we didn't even really even get to tour the first album,” says Wayne. “But what is important is that we've created two pieces of work that we've put out into the world that we're incredibly proud of. I think that in and of itself is something that we feel very lucky to have done, and we feel incredibly grateful for the audience that we have accumulated because of that. We don't take that for granted but enjoy those two albums for what they are and don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.”