Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There Review – breathtaking

Album	Ants From Up There
Artist	Black Country, New Road
Released	4 February 2022
Highlights	Good Will Hunting, The Place Where He Inserted the Blade, Basketball Shoes
Lowlights	None
Undertone rating	5/5

After their debut album catapulted the London septet to fame in 2021, Black Country, New Road return with a masterpiece that is somehow both sure-footed and wildly experimental. Released just after the sudden departure of the band’s frontman, Ants From Up There serves as a tragic, compelling self-portrait of a man on the brink.

I’d heard Black Country, New Road before this album, but I wasn’t listening. They were hardly a hidden gem for long. After just two singles, The Quietus perhaps over-zealously branded them the “best band in the world”, whilst their six-song debut album For the first time quickly scored the band a Mercury Prize nomination. Whilst the album’s slight lack of cohesion meant BC,NR didn’t go one step further and win the £25,000, there’s plenty about the 40-minutes of chaotic jazz/rock/folk/any-genre-you-fancy experimentalism to enjoy. It was demonic, wordless opener Instrumental that gripped me hardest – an organ-led descent into hell of demonic preportions that had me eager to hear the band delve more into modern jazz territory. That said, like their contemporaries black midi, there were aspects of BC,NR’s sound that felt simply too provacatively weird to fully enjoy. Isaac Wood’s spoken vocals, for example, sounded so melodramatic they often teetered dangerously towards self-parody.

It seems too early on in BC,NR’s existence to talk about self-reinvention, but Ants From Up There certainly sees plenty of deliberate changes for the band. As bassist Tyler Hyde mentioned in an interview with NME, it’s all “way more palatable” than the first album, with Wood crucially settling for sung vocals rather than the more hit-and-miss spoken word approach. Instrumentally, strong grooves and progressions are much more fully explored before moving onto something new, and driving 4/4 pop-rock grooves spring up often, making the whole album endlessly more dancable and hooky than the choppy passages on For the first time.

It’s impossible to discuss Ants From Up There without addressing the dispiritng elephant in the room. Just days before the album release, singer and guitarist Wood announced his immediate departure from the band for the sake of his own mental health. All shows were cancelled – including the one I’d already bought tickets for – and the future of the band left completely ambiguous. The sad truth is that Ants From Up There is an album that will never be toured and presented to audiences live; to search for a replacement for the idiosyncratic Wood would be pointless. Besides, his lyrics are far too personal to be performed by anyone but himself.

The manner in which Wood magnifies every last detail of his own doomed relationship on track after track is extraordinary.

In fact, the manner in which Wood magnifies every last detail of his own doomed relationship on track after track in Ants From Up There is extraordinary. Often he’s completely unaware quite how one-sided his love affair appears to the outside listener; the likening of his partner to a Concorde plane on several occasions is a potent metaphor. She is elegant and transfixing, yet hopelessly unobtainable as she blazes through the sky on Concorde, one of the album’s several strikingly tragic and beautiful love songs. Jaunty and quirky folk opener Chaos Space Marine follows similar lines, with Wood actively losing himself in games of Warhammer to avoid the cold reality of his deluded romance. It’s a suitably complex and chaotic composition, twisting and turning towards a pounding singalong chorus. The song’s cathartic outro is satisfying enough to work as an album closer in itself (“I’m coming home”), but BC,NR are just getting started.

Sonically, Chaos Space Marine is about as cheery as Ants From Up There gets. Impactful slow-burner Bread Song is far darker and colder, with Wood ruminating his own failings over a fluttering guitar and creaking violin drone. The premise – one partner (metaphorically or otherwise) eating bread in bed against the other’s wishes – is trivial and comic on paper, but in context it’s a devastating symbol of a relationship on the verge of collapse. Haldern, remarkably based on a improvised performance back in 2020, is just as bleak, yet, as elsewhere in the album, beautiful music sits comfortably alongside Wood’s dismal lyricism. Lewis Evans’ saxophone and Georgia Ellery’s violin blend as if produced by one mind, their riffs intersecting and interlocking like puzzle pieces. It’s a hugely effective partnership that’s also found in the latter half of Mark’s Theme, a deeply poignant, worldless elegy for Evans’ late uncle. May Kershaw’s tender piano playing evokes Debussy, whilst Evans’ sighing melody is a real stunner.

Ants From Up There‘s greatest moments of genius, however, come when the edginess of For the first time is melded with pop’s singalong immediacy. Perhaps no song acheives this better than Good Will Hunting, which switches metre and texture with astonishing ease. The groovy pre-chorus arrives as a refreshing surprise, whilst the Billie Eilish-referencing chorus eventually blossoms into an alt-rock head-banger to remember (that is, if you can avoid giving yourself a concussion). Later on comes The Place Where He Inserted the Blade, a waltzing, bittersweet folk ballad with an epic final chorus that genuinely had me dumbfounded on first listen. It’s all built on Kershaw’s lilting piano progression which bookends the song in style. Wistful violin and saxophone countermelodies and chill-inducing backing vocals rally behind Wood’s rousing vocals as he begs for a quick solution to a collapsing relationship. “Show me where to tie the end of this chain,” he pleads before being engulfed by the noise of the band. This is Ants From Up There‘s apex of tragic bliss, and it could hardly have been executed more powerfully.

Never have I truly felt an album closer as much as I feel Basketball Shoes. It’s music and human emotion that defies description.

It’s difficult to know where to start when it comes to discussing the epic one-two of Snow Globes and Basketball Shoes that closes the album, with the two songs taking up over 20 minutes of the album’s runtime between them. Often closing tracks are make-or-break moments an album, and for truly great albums, sticking the landing with something truly special is a must. Ants From Up There does exactly that. Snow Globes is essentially an enormous rise and fall around an eight bar loop, striking in its simplicity. Each instrumentalist is patiently introduced, with the song starting and ending on a single guitar note. All the repetition presents a unique opportunity for drummer Charlie Wayne, who spends much of the song thrashing the drums at full pelt. Wayne’s performance is nothing short of extraordinary; intensely expressive, deeply soulful and technically astounding. With Wayne’s help, Snow Globes transcends for a few brief minutes, his blizzard of cymbals and toms drowning out almost everything around him. The gradual cooldown for the final few minutes will have you contemplating what exactly just happened.

Basketball Shoes is no less remarkable. Ostensibly three or four songs blended together, it nicely wraps up the lyrical and musical motifs that crop up over and over throughout the album. The song itself is a journey so viscerally powerful it feels wrong to spoil it here – just listen to Basketball Shoes now. A final, ultra-heavy alt rock climax sounds like a victory lap. “Your generous loan, your crippling interest!” Wood cries, perhaps a final recognition that this person was not destined to be with him. It’s difficult to know what to feel but awe when the great din at last grinds to a halt. All there is to do is sit and process what just happened. Never have I truly felt an album closer as much as I feel Basketball Shoes. It’s music and human emotion that defies description.

What now then, for the six remaining members of Black Country, New Road? No one seems to have the faintest idea of how the band will adapt in the wake of their current crisis, perhaps not even the band members themselves. Such an inevitably successful (and already critically acclaimed) album may feel like a burden now it’s been rendered untourable. A forced hiatus seems the most likely outcome, and perhaps an instrumental third album. There’s only one thing I know for sure: whatever happens next, I’m listening now.