For the last 12-plus months, Black Country, New Road have enjoyed the sort of acclaim many young bands could only dream of. But, in the days before they released their second album, their lead vocalist, Isaac Wood, announced he was quitting. Sax player Lewis Evans and drummer Charlie Wayne talk to Prog about creating Ants From Up There and why they’ve decided to carry on as a sextet.

Words: Rob Hughes

Black Country, New Road (pictured with former vocalist Isaac Wood) are taking a new route.

Images: Rosie Foster

Charlie Wayne still has a voice memo on his phone from summer 2018. The drummer and his bandmates in the newly formed Black Country, New Road had just hit on an interesting musical motif at rehearsals. “It just grew and grew and became more distorted,” he explains. “Then about a year later we started writing what would become Basketball Shoes. It just came from a lot of different composite parts brought together. By the beginning of 2020 we were playing it properly as a band. It always felt like the sum total of everything the group had been moving towards for a while.”

At 12-and-a-half minutes long, the magnificent Basketball Shoes now forms the anchor of Black Country, New Road’s latest album, Ants From Up There. Released exactly a year after their exhilarating debut, For The First Time, it caps 12 months of accelerated popular acclaim. They’ve been routinely lauded by critics as Britain’s brightest young things, crashed into the Top 5 of the UK album charts and been nominated for the Mercury Prize.