Ants From Up There

Four days before this album was released, Isaac Wood announced he was leaving the band. He cited his mental health and his discomfort with writing and performing songs that had become too personally exposing to play every night in front of crowds. The statement he published was elliptical and strange and tender. The remaining six members of Black Country, New Road refused to perform the album live after his departure, feeling it would be wrong to play his songs without him. They never did.

The album was recorded at Chale Abbey on the Isle of Wight in July 2021, produced by the band's live sound engineer, and captures a seven-piece band at the full height of a creative momentum that had been building since they started playing residencies at a small London venue and developed a devoted following before most people had heard a note. The music is orchestral and sprawling and funny and devastating in roughly equal measure, with saxophone, violin, piano, guitar, and Wood's voice building and collapsing across songs about Concorde, Billie Eilish, and the specific ache of loving something that cannot love you back. The closing track "Basketball Shoes" runs twelve minutes and ends with a repeated phrase that sounds, in the context of everything that followed, like a goodbye.

Ants From Up There was received as one of the finest British rock albums in years. It is also, in the most literal possible sense, the document of a band that no longer exists in the form that made it. Listen to it knowing that and see if it sounds the same.