MANCHESTER, England — Last month, the six members of Black Country, New Road joked in a cramped rehearsal room to try something new: everyone sang lead vocals.
First, Tyler Hyde, the group’s bassist, sat forward and sang—her voice jumped between a soft pop cry and a raucous scream. The following May, Kershaw, mostly on piano, took over, her voice soft and brittle like a folk singer’s. Then Lewis Evans, the saxophonist, sang two songs.
“Dope as hell,” Charlie Wayne, the band’s drummer, said when Evans had finished. Evans didn’t seem too sure. “I was a little too slow!” he said, sounding frustrated.
Just six months ago, Black Country, New Road, one of Britain’s up-and-coming rock acts, was a very different proposition. At the time, lead vocals were the domain of just one frontman: Isaac Wood, an intense and at times anxious-sounding singer, whose enamored lyrics helped Black Country, New Road win fans and critical devotion. The group’s debut album, ‘For the First Time’, was nominated last year for a Mercury Prize, the most important British music award. The second song, “Ants From Up There,” was named Critic’s Pick by the DailyExpertNews.
But just before New Year’s Eve, Wood sent his bandmates a Facebook message. He could no longer be in the public eye, he said. The stress of pouring out his heart on stage was too much. He left.
Wayne said that when that message arrived, the band’s first thought was “our friend’s safety.” But once that was certain—Wood is in a much better place now, said Evans, who luckily worked in a pastry shop—the rest of the members had to decide what to do next.
Several band members gathered to discuss that moment in a sunny garden after rehearsal last month. Splitting up was never an option, Kershaw said, because “playing together is so important to us.”
However, the band members seemed to disagree about how difficult the reboot had been. When Evans said starting over after Wood’s departure “wasn’t that bad,” Hyde and Kershaw looked at each other confused and laughed nervously. But his departure made everyone realize more about how much pressure the lead singer of a band can be. So they found a solution: share the burden.
At Wood’s insistence, they kept the band name but decided to stop playing the songs he had sung (Wood did not respond to requests for comment for this story). This meant that the musicians had spent five intense, fun, but sometimes stressful months writing nine songs before rehearsal to fulfill European festival dates this summer. Without the income from those gigs, Evans said, they would have had to get jobs, so they would hardly have been able to play together.
Growing financial and emotional pressures on musicians have long been the focus of media attention in Britain. In 2017, Help Musicians, a non-profit organization, established a 24-hour helpline to provide support to people with mental health problems or financial anxieties. Such concerns only increased as the pandemic closed live venues, while the cost of living crisis raised further concerns.
Wood’s departure illustrated that pressure, said John Doran, a music journalist who has long championed Black Country, New Road. Being in a successful indie band could once lead to a good lifestyle. Now, Doran said in a phone interview, deeds are exhausting themselves “to maybe one day have a mortgage and not need a side job.” It’s “no wonder musicians are under so much stress,” added Doran. “I don’t envy them at all.”
In fact, this is the second time the members of Black Country, New Road – all still in their early 20s – have had to reboot.
Four years ago, almost all of them played in another act called Nervous Conditions, who were on the cusp of breaking into Britain’s competitive indie music scene. With only a few songs online, tasteful websites explained the group was one of the country’s “most exciting proposals” and representatives from record labels flocked to the shows. But when the frontman, Connor Browne, faced anonymous allegations of sexual assault, he released a statement apologizing for the hurt caused, and the group disbanded.
Hyde said the band members had learned lessons from that point on. After the split, “the whole ethos became, ‘We’re doing this for us and because we want to,'” she said. Since then, the band has rewritten songs and changed lyrics when they got tired of it, she added.
When asked how they managed to reinvent themselves over and over, the musicians said it helped to have so many band members with different interests. But for the fans of the group, other factors were more important. Geordie Greep from black midi, a London-based band that is touring the United States with Black Country, New Road in September, said in a telephone interview that the members of the group were virtuoso musicians. That gave them the ingenuity to keep changing their style, he said.
The members of Black Country, New Road — most of whom have known each other since high school — also clearly had a strong bond in common, Greep added. “These guys really go out of their way to just hang out as friends,” he said, a little stunned. Most bands, including his own, don’t, he noted.
Even for such a close-knit group of musicians, the process of transitioning to lead vocals hasn’t always been easy. Evans said he “got shakes” the first time he sang a song he wrote for his bandmates. Kershaw said she found it “nervous” and told everyone to “don’t worry” if they thought her songs weren’t “the right vibe”. She squirmed in her chair as she remembered the memory.
But with shows looming, the band members had to conquer their nerves again to sing in front of a paying audience. A few days later, the band took the stage at the Pink Room, a music venue in Manchester, northern England, filled with 250 people (the group canceled a sold-out 1,800-seat show in the city shortly after Wood left).
If Evans was still nervous, he didn’t have to be. As soon as he started playing an upbeat saxophone melody to open the song “Up Song”, he was greeted by cheers from the crowd. When the band got to the raucous chorus, the crowd started jumping up and down and singing along, as if they’d heard the song hundreds of times. “Look at what we’ve done together,” the band sang in unison, “BC, NR/Friends forever.”
A few songs later, even the bar staff fell silent as Kershaw sang “Turbines/Pigs,” an eight-minute song in which she plays a soft piano melody while singing, “Don’t waste your pearls on me/I’m only a pig. “
After 45 minutes, the band walked off stage with some polite waves. Some fans clamored for more, until they realized Black Country, New Road couldn’t come back for an encore, even if they wanted to. The new incarnation had played all the songs she had.