The heart is a delicate organ, with any rip or tear compromising the health of the entire body. To protect its tenderness, it’s shielded by the ribcage: one would either have to contort their body by choice or endure a great act of violence to pierce the heart. Perhaps this relationship between heart and bone is the best way to understand Black Country, New Road’s Forever Howlong, an exceptional record that explores the inherent bravery of friendship and love, mostly through a dance between shielding and exposing the heart. Narrated by the band’s three (temporary) front women—Georgia Ellery, Tyler Hyde, and May Kershaw—this new collection of songs, which couples poetic lyricism with a balance between folk rock and twee and chamber pop, is some of the band’s strongest yet.

Now with their first studio record since 2022’s Ants From Up There, Black Country New Road is back with another project to highlight their own members’ individual and group skills. We got a taste of the revised lineup’s collaborative working style on 2023’s Live At Bush Hall, a live- recorded album that comprised of nine songs they wrote to perform on tours after their original front man Isaac Wood left. Also focusing on the intricacies of friendship—when one leaves, quits, yearns, envies, or appreciates another’s company—Live At Bush Hall generally stuck to the band’s original sound of ambitious chamber pop that combined rock with punk and bits of jazz and classical. It established the motif of the rotating front person (Kershaw, Hyde, and saxophonist Lewis Evans perform), but beyond those two kernels of surrealist songwriting found in Kershaw’s ballads “The Boy” and “Turbines/Pigs,” the songs felt relatively safe, at least for this band.

It’s impressive, then, to see how much BCNR grew in Forever Howlong. While the central idea of love unifies the record, it’s still clear that there are multiple songwriters riffing off each other—stitching together each other’s songs to make one, giant collage. Ellery’s tracks tend to take on a classic, gentle folk rock swing with a sweet, chirpy brightness in her vocals and simpler lyrics about friendship and trust, only venturing into the fictional ballad once (“Two Horses”) to depict the dangers and thrills of vulnerability. Hyde’s contributions are loosely woven, complicated narratives that sacrifice traditional structure for a concise fable about the hardening of the heart. Songs like “Happy Birthday” and “Nancy Tries to Take the Night,” which both explore themes of robbed innocence and coping with a harsh and apathetic world, barely have proper choruses, relying instead on cold platitudes like “Cheer up, child” and “Do you want it?” to temper its chamber pop, twee maximalism. Kershaw, then, completes the trio with her longer, Joanna Newson-inspired tracks that strike that balance between heart and bone. The acidity in “Forever Howlong”—the band’s most minimal song yet, as it relies on breath work, light instrumentals, and silence—is felt in Kershaw’s raw depiction of melancholy. As she sings about boiling beans, balancing the pH in her gut, getting sunshine, and talking to the faraway neighbors, she captures that feeling of being lonely in one’s own body, sometimes treating it like an autonomous pet that ignores the hot, gushing blood coming from the narrator’s skull in the first verse. These motions become mechanic and meaningless, reflecting the “cold grey morning” that starts her day, but the labor is still a gesture of love. The sparsity of the song seems to suggest that, while all these tiny remedies might not be much, they still fight valiantly to protect the body.

Forever Howlong triumphs because it still has total harmony among all the band members, even when taking big swings into a more minimalistic sound and non-traditional songwriting. The first track “Besties” explodes with the familiarity of a prominent saxophone melody, thrashing of drums and guitar, and harmonic screams of all the members before it shrinks into a quiet, plucky, and folksy tune about the intimacy of female friendships. All members assert their signature flairs throughout the record, not just the vocalists: Evans’ saxophone parts are immaculate, especially during his duet with Kershaw’s piano that rapidly waltzes around Hyde’s ever more exasperated sighs in “Nancy Tries to Take the Night.” Drummer Charlie Wayn injects adrenaline into the second half of Ellery’s “Two Horses” by adding a quick hi-hat and bass drum combo that allows the song to gallop, increasing a sense of urgency as the “faraway traveler” learns her companion had betrayed her trust en route to her destination. And who could forget guitarist Luke Mark’s heavy guitar that gives “Happy Birthday” its grit, or his soothing and meditative finger-picking of the acoustic guitar in “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)” and “Mary”? The record has all six names all over it, and it’s this unique musical cohesion of the band—not just the strength of their lyrical concepts—that makes Forever Howlong spectacular.

Perhaps most beautiful, however, is the lyrical and musical harmony achieved between the three women specifically. In the songwriting process, they treat each track like a piece of a greater dialogue. Ellery’s desire to “see my best friend waving at me / I wanna be living with you / Seeing it through” in “Besties” becomes the central claim reconsidered, reimagined, and reworked in the other tracks. Kershaw, for instance, transforms this idea in “For the Cold Country” with the climactic, earnest rush of, “I am proud to know you / Can I make a cup of coffee? / Can I sit down next to you? / I might not speak for a while / But, just to be here with you, be with you?” Hyde’s “Nancy” character traverses the world by herself like Ellery’s “lone traveller” in “Two Horses,” struggling with her own impulses to trust the people near her and find a space to be able to love. Couple these with the moments the three women unite on stage with their vocals. Either by singing the entirety of “Mary” in a simple, somber three-part harmony—supported only by the warmth of a classical guitar—or finding each other’s pulses in the hymn-like choral introduction to “For the Cold Country,” they are in active conversation with each other, tightening their own bonds while finding the delicate balance between individuality and collaboration.

Forever Howlong brims with youth, wisdom, and courage. It ends with “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me),” an easy-going, folk rock song with a flower power-era, psychedelic flair. “I’ve fallen in love with a feeling,” Ellery sighs in that bright, wispy birdsong voice of hers: to cry, to grieve, to hurt, and to bleed can be a beautiful thing sometimes because they are never truly lonely acts. The record reminds us that while ribs may break and cause the heart to spill all its blood, there will always be people rushing with bandages, casts, and remedies. The healing may not prevent another, future rupture, but it does something more powerful: it allows us to keep breathing. It allows us to love again.

Pre-order Forever Howlong HERE