All Change!
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 now forms the anchor of Black Country, New Road’s latest album, . Released exactly a year after their exhilarating debut, , 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.
