Near the end of 2022 I stumbled upon a band that instantly caught my attention. I was playing Spotify’s post-punk editorial playlist at work and heard a song that sounded like nothing else on the queue. The voice sounded like a post-punk vocalist with all the deep vibrato but was delivered with more vulnerability and emotion than cold determinism. The instrumentation carried a similar cadence and rhythm to the other artists but was almost entirely played on strings and woodwinds. The song was “Chaos Space Marine,” and the artist was Black Country, New Road. I took note of this and continued with my work. Then, later in the playlist, another song of theirs played. This one was much slower, musically less similar to the rest of the songs playing. “Concorde” was the song that got me to get out my phone and find the album, Ants From Up There, and save it in my library. I tried playing the album at work but there were too many quiet parts to be heard properly (I work with heavy machinery) but what I could hear was so unlike anything I’d heard before that I knew I needed to give it a proper listen on my headphones in an environment where I could give it more of my attention.

There are albums that, as soon as you hear them, you know are going to change your life. A feeling you get, an internal shift in how you experience the world and music, in how you feel in your body and spirit. For me, these are albums like In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, The Execution Of All Things, The Monitor, albums filled with raw emotion that you as the listener cannot help but be immersed in. Ants From Up There, BCNR’s second studio album, is one of those albums for me. Being the person I am, I had to look into it. I learned that it was, similar to Aeroplane or The Monitor, sort of a concept album. Where Aeroplane centered around Anne Frank and The Monitor around the Civil War, Ants From Up There used the short-lived supersonic passenger plane Concorde as its central analogy. AFUT, like The Monitor, is at its core a breakup album. Unlike The Monitor, however, it is a distinctly un-bitter album. Where The Monitor is full of Titus Andronicus lead singer and songwriter Patrick Stickles screaming at the top of this lungs about feelings of worthlessness and hatred in the face of being cheated on and disposed of, BCNR frontman Isaac Wood sings with unparalleled passion and vulnerability, but there is no real animosity in his voice. He sings about feeling distant from a person who is right in front of him, that feeling of knowing someone has moved on from you while feeling unable to do the same, and watching them navigate the world without you as you try to hold onto them. It is heart-wrenching and unflinching in its depictions of despair and longing, but it never feels angry to me, and at the end of 2022, this was exactly what I needed. I connected with this album on a deep level, and it immediately changed my world. I was in a creative rut and it gave me a new way to think about music and lyrics. I was more depressed than I had been in years and it gave me a perspective that didn’t seek to erase that but to frame it in a different context. It made me feel less alone at a time when I felt isolated in a way I hadn’t really felt before. It was a life raft the world threw to me when I was drowning, and I held onto it for dear life. Even as of writing this in 2025, I consider this album to be one of my favorites of all time and one of the best albums of the 21st century.

One of the first things I learned looking into this album, along with the concept album bit, was that the singer Isaac Wood had left the band abruptly, within just a few days of the album being released to critical acclaim. There is something romantic to me about a piece of art so vulnerable and introspective that the artist feels they need to back away after making it, much like Jeff Mangum disappearing from the music world after Aeroplane blew up. It deepened my emotional investment in the album and the influence it was having on the art I wanted to make myself. Of course this meant Wood would not tour the album with the band, and the band announced that they would not tour at all as they didn’t want to replace him or to sing these songs that were so uniquely his themselves. At some point months later they announced a handful of shows and clarified that they would be playing all new material. Then, in 2023, they released a concert film called Live At Bush Hall, where they played these new songs in front of a live audience of their devoted fans and friends. The venue is turned into a sort of late 80’s/90’s prom, with the band and audience dressed accordingly. Rather than bringing on a new frontperson or having a band member become the lead singer, they each take turns in the lead singing songs each of them wrote. I watched this video as soon as it came out, my expectations set higher than I would have wished, and I was spellbound. While none of them attempted to take up the kind of space that Isaac Wood did, they each had a distinct presence as they sang their respective songs in their respective lyrical voices. A little while later they released this as an album, and I put it on constant rotation. The songs covered a fairly wide breadth of subjects and feelings, ranging from the importance of friendship to feeling like you gave your best self to someone who is now gone and not knowing what that means for you now. They then announced a U.S. tour where they would be playing this material, and I bought tickets the moment they went on sale. 

A few weeks before the show a venue change was announced, moving the show from Great American Music Hall to the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco, to accommodate higher demand than anticipated. I was excited. I had recently seen Japanese Breakfast at the Regency and felt that its operatic atmosphere would be perfect for the dramatics of Black Country New Road. When I got there and got inside I swiftly made my way to the merch line to see what they had and try to snag something before the show started. They had a few T-shirts and hats and bags, all with prints on them that looked… almost intentionally bad. The main one I remember was an illustration of a pickup truck jumping a dirt ramp, printed on a trucker hat like the ones popular in the 2000’s. I scoured that merch table for anything I wanted even a little and came out empty. I was disappointed but tried not to let that affect my mood for the show. I’ve seen Animal Collective about 6 times since their 2009 Merriweather Post Pavillion tour and have found I think 1 piece of merch I actually liked and wore out. So, I grabbed a drink at the bar and headed into the show space to find a spot. I didn’t feel a need to be front and center, especially among a crowd of people about 10 years younger than me, so I found a spot on the side where I had a good view of the stage. After an opener played, the members of BCNR walked onto the stage as the crowd closed in and cheered and the lights dimmed. The members walked onto the stage to take their places, but instead of standing in a band formation near the front of the stage they formed a V shape with the opening towards the audience. I was confused, and a little put off. For one, this formation made it specifically difficult to see them from the side of the stage. Again, trying to not have these aesthetic things ruin my experience, I accepted that this was weird and moved on. Or, tried to. They opened with “Up Song,” the opener from their live album, and played their way through every song they had as this new group (according to them). For every song I looked for who was singing since that’s who I usually mostly focus on, but it was surprisingly hard. No one really physically indicated that they were singing in any noticeable way. At this point, I accepted that I was disappointed in the experience. I stayed and tried to at least enjoy hearing the songs played live and focus on that experience. They played and sang the songs perfectly, which unfortunately did not help, and they played a couple of new songs that were probably good but failed to make me more excited about being there. When the lights came back on I left quickly and walked the few blocks to my car. I thought about why they would set themselves up that way, starting to form theories in my head, and then after getting on the highway decided I needed to listen to Ants From Up There and blasted it all the way back to Santa Cruz where I was living at the time.

I was kind of shook by this experience. For 5 years I booked several DIY shows a month and rarely if ever did I find a band’s performance “disappointing.” Bad? Hackneyed? Yes, repeatedly. But even the least proficient bands usually played with heart. I’ve watched singers ham their way through uncreative lyrics and many stoic talk-singers take themselves way too seriously but they at least felt like they were giving some form of performance related to how they wanted the music to be conveyed, and that was when something clicked. I started thinking about performance, about what makes a performance (yes I think these painfully pretentious things to myself don’t at me), and about the Black Country New Road show. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like that was what had been missing; performance. They played the songs, so technically they performed the songs, but did they give a performance? I had had the thought when I was leaving the theatre that it felt in spirit more like a school band recital than a rock-adjacent concert and now I was understanding why. There is a vulnerable element to performance, as a performer you open yourself up to your audience with how you carry yourself and communicate. Even if your stage persona is stoic and unemotional, that conveys something to the audience about the music they’re listening to and the artist they’re watching. By setting themselves up in that V formation away from the audience, it felt like they were intentionally removing that element and protecting themselves from that vulnerability, which in many cases in music would be fine and appropriate but considering how vulnerable and emotional their songs are this was not one. I fell in love with this band because of the raw emotion in their lyrics and music and I went to that show to see those songs played with emotion, not because I needed to know what their violin sounds like through an SM57 over house speakers. It felt almost like an anti-performance, an idea I’m willing to entertain despite thinking is pretentious even for me. Why else would they set the stage up like that? In the Live At Bush Hall video they are arranged more like a rock band, with the drummer in the back and the others spread around the front of the stage, and that felt genuine. The only real reason I could come up with was this anti-performance idea, until I started thinking about the age group the band members and most of its fans are in. 

I don’t like being one of those people who’s always finding ways to complain about the younger generation. I think there are lots of good reasons the older generations historically disagree with the younger that are not the fault of the youth, and I remember when Millennials were being talked about like the four horsemen of the apocalypse for things as dumb as not eating at Applebee’s or for preferring craft beer. But, as someone who pays a lot of attention to culture and how it shifts over time, I can’t help but be critical of some of the trends I see emerging in Gen Z. Anti-intellectualism is a social trend with real consequences that we are now experiencing in real time as a population fed up with being told to embrace a complicated world has elected a fascist idiot who only had to promise them that the world is actually simple and he would eradicate all the complications from view. I don’t think BCNR’s anti-performance is necessarily anti-intellectual, but I think it’s rooted in an adjacent problem, and this was confirmed for me recently. An offshoot of anti-intellectualism I’ve seen dominate online spaces is this notion that intellectualism as we know it is a tool of patriarchy and thus it is anti-feminist to expect people to engage in it. There is, of course, some truth to this. Academic curricula are overstuffed with white male names and a few women often relegated to a sort of tokenism or “alternative” viewpoint, reinforcing the male perspective as the standard. To be a feminist in an intellectual space is to recognize this. However, it is one thing to see this and say “I am going to de-center male perspectives” and another to say “To expect me to engage with male perspectives is sexist.” The latter is what I have been seeing a disturbing amount of online, and while this would be troubling enough on its own, the majority of people I see touting this philosophy also seem to be entirely uninterested in seeking out non-male perspectives within intellectualism. Rather than trying to reinvent intellectualism in a non-patriarchal framework, they have rejected intellectualism altogether without actually replacing it with anything. This phenomenon I believe is connected to what I view as a rejection of leadership itself. In the interest of keeping this article to a length I will actually finish writing and you will hopefully finish reading, I will sum it up as this: Leadership is inherently hierarchical, and hierarchy is inherently patriarchal, and therefore; leadership is inherently patriarchal. This anti-leadership mentality, that I view to be rooted in anti-intellectualism, is what I saw in that BCNR concert. That was really the only satisfying motive, conscious or unconscious, I could find for the way they refused to have anyone in the front of the stage acting as the center of attention in any given moment.

After my disappointing experience at their concert, I stopped listening to Black Country New Road for a while. It was hard to separate my feelings about their anti-performance from the music. Then, earlier this year, they released a new single and announced a studio album. Before I could actually listen to the single, called “Besties,” I ended up reading pieces of an interview they did with Pitchfork, who had given glowing reviews to all of their prior releases. The interview, unfortunately, affirmed what I had been thinking. In it, one of the members talks about how Ants From Up There was distinctly a “man’s breakup album” and that this album was going to be decidedly not that. As a non-man who related profoundly to that album, this was hard to read. For one, I didn’t think it was a particularly masculine album apart from the tone of Isaac Wood’s voice and the fact that the album is written in his perspective. I didn’t read the whole article, since I was getting frustrated the more I read and was at work anyway, but when I got in my car I immediately played “Besties” and tried to give it a fair shot. It’s a short song in relation to most of their others, and thematically it was definitely aiming for what had become their most popular song, “Up Song,” also a short one. Musically, I spent the 3 or so minutes listening to plucky piano playing and chipper vocals, waiting for the song to shift into something that felt substantive, and for a moment I thought it was coming, as the rest of the band comes in with a string crescendo and drum kit, but then it settled into what it had been doing before and then ended. I almost couldn’t believe it when the song ended and the next song on my queue played. It sounded like something that would have played in a Target commercial in like 2014; this vaguely indie upbeat piano song about how great it is to be with friends. This really cemented for me the idea that they had decided against having a front-person on ideological grounds. They were trying to distance themselves from the version of the band that had released Ants From Up There not because they artistically felt like taking a new direction, but because they felt a need to noticeably reject any perceived patriarchal presence in their image. Furthermore, this new and profoundly un-challenging sound of theirs felt like an extension of this mindset. There is an inherently intellectual element to an album like Ants From Up There. Beyond the layers of historical and pop culture references that make it feel like the lyric sheets are riddled with footnotes, the music itself demands your attention. There is dissonance and dynamic tension, there are long slow drawls, and a singer whose voice won’t loosen its grip on you even when it softens to a whisper. It is not a casual listen for a casual listener, and the fact that anything from it made it onto a major playlist would be a miracle were it not for the overwhelming merit earned through its sheer compositional competency. To actively strip the music of this demanding element and the lyrics of any real substantive content to me feels anti-intellectual. Again, faced with profound disappointment over a band I loved and had high expectations of, I tried to not rush to conclusions. A week or so later I watched the music video at home, hoping it would click upon second listen in a different setting. Nope. Just “vibey” shots of young people enjoying each other’s company in a few settings. Then, feeling defeated and frustrated, I watched Live At Bush Hall again. I was a little afraid, I worried something I loved would now be tainted. Thankfully that wasn’t the case. Rather, I found myself watching a passionate band give a passionate performance of songs with thoughtful, unique arrangements and lyrics filled with stories about the complexities of relationships, be them romantic like “I Won’t Always Love You” or platonic like “Wrong Trousers.” It seems to me that somewhere between filming this concert, actually going on tour to the U.S., and recording this new album, this band of immensely talented individuals who together created something better than the sum of its parts, something that felt unprecedented and exciting, decided to dumb it down for an audience that doesn’t want to engage intellectually with what could otherwise be entertainment, to mire something that could be thoughtlessly enjoyable with “complications.”

Maybe I’m being overly critical. Maybe I’m holding this band’s prior work too dear and have succumbed to some Millennial hipster pearl-clutching. Maybe this album is their Merriweather Post Pavillion and “Besties” is “My Girls,” a song that can feel vapid and thoughtless for a band known for challenging music and obscure lyrics until heard in the context of the album and given time to resonate. And maybe, I think more probably, this band has shifted its direction in a way that I am no longer the target audience for. Forever Howlong comes out in a little over a week and I will give it as fair a listen as I am capable of. And when it disappoints me, as I have already prepared myself for it to do, I will at the end of the day know that no matter what this band goes on to do and how I feel about it, they will have given me two pieces of art that made my life better, and that will live with me forever.