Black Country, New Road live at the Glasshouse review – not what it once was

Artist	Black Country, New Road
Venue	The Glasshouse, Gateshead
Date	20 September 2025
Opener	For the Cold Country
Closer	Happy Birthday
Highlight	Salem Sisters
Undertone rating	3/5

The boundary-pushing Cambridge band have boldly ventured forth into a third album after departing frontman Isaac Wood left a gaping hole in the lineup. Three years on, the band’s spectacular glory days still cast a long shadow over this middling live set in Gateshead.

You don’t forget where you were the first time you heard Ants From Up There. I was walking beside the river Ouse in York on a blustery February afternoon, weak sun fighting its way through clouds and the swaying branches of sycamores. I had to sit down by the time I reached perhaps the album’s highlight, The Place Where He Inserted the Blade, not out of tiredness, but out of the sheer emotional force of the music. A few years has passed, but no album since has awed me quite as much as Black Country, New Road’s masterpiece does.

Ants From Up There‘s tumultuous release cycle – inspired frontman Isaac Wood dramatically left the band mere days before the album came out – soon became part of AFUT‘s mythology and cult-classic appeal. When Wood demanded “Show me where to tie the other end of this chain” in The Place …, it came with an exhilarating, frightening frisson of reality; this really could be the final cry for help from a man struggling to hold his life together. He left behind a band of six wonderfully creative musicians but, undeniably, a band depleted of its greatest artistic asset.

Luckily, BC,NR have no shortage of talent, and bassist Tyler Hyde, pianist May Kershaw and violinist Georgia Ellery all stepped up as joint lead vocalists. AFUT‘s tour included no music from that album – replacing Wood’s vocals for those heart-wrenchingly vulnerable songs was unthinkable – but did include a swiftly put together new batch of songs that would later be polished into Live at Bush Hall. It was an impressive quick-time pivot, and whilst some fans still bemoan the post-Wood lyrics like Up Song‘s “Look at what we did together / BCNR friends forever”, performed to a fever pitch crowd at Brudenell Social Club those words were greeted with whoops and cheers of elation. Somehow, BCNR had survived just about intact.

The band’s visit to Newcastle the following year was admittedly something of a damp squib – blame it on Newcastle University Student Union’s awful soundsystem – but 2025 saw the release of the band’s first proper album since AFUT, the dense, technicolour Forever Howlong. If AFUT is an album about male loneliness, Forever Howlong is an album about female friendship, with the three vocalists exchanging elaborate tales about witches, knights and shady James Dean lookalikes lurking in taverns with tangible chemistry.

Forever Howlong‘s success earned the band the mother of all upgrades when it comes to Newcastle gig venues: from dingy NUSU to the magnificent Glasshouse, a solid contender for Britain’s finest temple of music. The band seemed understandably a little awed by the spacious auditorium. “We’ve never played anywhere like this before,” Tyler Hyde explained early on. “Our suit jackets are on for a reason,” beamed drummer Charlie Wayne.

As Wayne pointed out, the classical music setting had a tendency to make the performance feel “arch”, like it was all one cohesive symphonic piece of art. Indeed, Forever Howlong feels like BC,NR’s most cerebral record, with time signatures and keys – let alone riffs and chord progressions – rarely sticking around for long. This relentless flitting between contrasting ideas can be frustrating, yet it also creates a detailed theatricality, the music mirroring the precise mood of every last lyric. Hyde is no stranger to a bit of onstage flair in her solo work but in Gateshead, disappointingly, BC,NR are very much in stand-and-deliver mode, often with their heads bowed over their instruments. The vocalists are of course tied down to mic stands, but this gig felt much more static and disjointed than it needed to be. Too often, this was a performance of six individuals rather than one band.

It helped that each of those individuals happen to be exceptional musicians. Kershaw glides across her keyboard with remarkable ease, each fingertip elegantly finding its target in the nick of time, even when things get noisy. Lewis Evans had the tricky task of finding space for a saxophone amidst the swirling folk and alt rock, and succeeded in adding a smoky haze of jazz to the arrangements without ever overpowering them with a showy solo. Of the three vocalists, Hyde was the clear standout with her impressive range from boisterous patter to delicate warble. Tonight she’s at her best in Socks, delivering the words “all things must pass” in shimmering falsetto before launching into a rollicking chorus suitable for a drunken singalong. Georgia Ellery, whose featherlight vocals provide a perfect juxtaposition to Taylor Skye’s muscular electronics in their duo Jockstrap, sounded somewhat frail by comparison tonight.

Whilst BC,NR’s early songs often landed on one killer riff and twisted it into a multitude of new shapes (see the abysmal guitar stabs in the second half of Sunglasses, for example), tonight’s songs more often felt unfocussed and scattergun, trying too hard to say everything and in the process saying very little at all. Kershaw’s For the Cold Country made for a particularly unwieldy opening, and even as the song reached its stab-filled crescendo each band member seemed to be merely going through the motions, watching the floor in front of them. It was a shame, since BC,NR are high class songwriters; Two Horses’ cinematic Western narrative ended in a propulsive hoedown, and Besties remains an endearingly odd flag bearing single for the current iteration of the band, Kershaw gliding through a knotty harpsichord part with that trademark effortlessness.

As much as Isaac Wood remains a conspicuous absence, a trio of lead vocalists provides plenty of new opportunities for BC,NR. In Gateshead they were at their best when linking up for instinctive, seamless three-part harmonies, like on folksy Mary, a desolate portrait of a bullied schoolgirl. The wonderful Salem Sisters contains the new album’s finest chorus and what feels like the correct vocal configuration – charismatic, earthy Hyde taking lead vocals, with Kershaw and Ellery offering ghostly backing vocals. Hyde hit some Kate Bush undertones with her cheerful story about being burnt at the stake (“That’s what summer is for!”), but it’s not quite Hounds of Love just yet. Hyde’s theatrical melodies surely have more to give on future material.

Of course, there were no renditions of the remarkable tracks from BC,NR’s first two albums with Wood, but also precious little from Live at Bush Hall – I can’t have been the only concertgoer feeling a little shortchanged not to hear the awesome swell of fan favourite Turbines/Pigs. Instead, we got a perfunctory cover of Big Star’s The Ballad of El Goodo (“one of the greatest songs in rock history”, apparently) and a rendition of Dancers sans drums and guitars. Without Wayne’s firepower on drums, the latter fell flat, lacking all the stormy dynamism of what is a clear highlight from Bush Hall. “It’s different from what it once was, but aren’t we all,” Hyde sighed into the microphone afterwards. Perhaps she intended her remark to be a staunch defence of a band working hard at the tricky task of reinventing themselves. Instead, it sounded more like an apology.