The thing about watching a band become itself is that you never quite know it's happening while it's happening. You're just there, in some small room, watching seven people play music that feels wrong in all the right ways, and you think: something is going on here that I don't have the language for yet. Black Country, New Road gave me that feeling repeatedly from the moment their early singles started circulating. That slightly panicked sensation of not knowing how to categorise something good, of the available boxes being the wrong shape.
And then Isaac Wood left. Before Ants from Up There even came out, before most people had heard it, he stepped back from the band citing mental health. On 31 January 2022, four days before the album's release on Ninja Tune, the announcement came. The record he's on, his voice and his words and the extraordinary emotional crescendo of that final track, "Basketball Shoes," which feels like a man both confessing and transcending whatever it is he's confessing, became something that happened once and couldn't happen again. An object. A document of a specific time that closed itself off even as it opened up.
The Album That Arrived Already Elegiac
There's a particular sadness in music that sounds elegiac before you even know there's anything to mourn. I listened to Ants from Up There across a single evening in February and by the end I felt I'd been somewhere significant. The Klezmer inflections, the Steve Reich rhythms, the way the string arrangements comment on the songs rather than supporting them, Isaac's voice going from conversational mumble to something that cracks wide open, all of it adds up to something you don't hear very often. A band operating simultaneously with total formal control and total emotional abandon.
The production deserves specific credit here. Sergio Maschetzko, the band's live sound engineer, produced the record, and that choice matters. A live sound engineer doesn't approach a studio as an abstract space for construction. He hears the room, hears the ensemble, hears the way seven instruments coexist in physical proximity. Ants from Up There sounds the way it does because someone was listening to the band the way a band actually sounds, not the way a band sounds when it's been reassembled piece by piece in post. That aliveness in the recording, that sense of the music breathing as a collective organism, is earned.
What the rest of the band did next is a different story, and equally interesting. They didn't stop. They reconstituted, shifted, kept going. The six remaining members share vocal duties on new work. The version of BC,NR that exists now, making music on stage and finding new configurations, is doing something that doesn't sound like grief exactly, more like adaptation. Which is its own kind of beautiful.
On the Courage of Not Giving Up a Sound
Most bands, faced with the departure of their singer and primary lyricist, would dissolve or regroup as something different enough to avoid the comparison. BC,NR's decision to continue as themselves, or rather as a version of themselves that is genuinely themselves, strikes me as either very brave or very natural, and I suspect it's the latter. Music this good tends to have a logic that exceeds any one person's contribution to it. The remaining members also made a specific, principled call: they would not perform music written with Isaac Wood after his departure. That's a meaningful boundary. It treats the Wood era as its own closed chapter rather than a back catalogue to mine for nostalgia.
I've been in a lot of rooms listening to bands play, and very rarely do you feel what I felt watching early BC,NR footage. The sense of a group in communication with something larger than any individual part. That quality doesn't go away when one member leaves. It changes shape. It finds new channels. The grief for what Isaac Wood brought is real. So is the interest in what comes next.
What the Early Singles Were Doing
The band emerged from the London post-punk scene, and their early singles, "Sunglasses" and "Opus 7" among them, showed something different to what most of their contemporaries were doing. Post-punk tends toward austerity, toward the stripped and abrasive. BC,NR moved in the opposite direction. They added. Saxophones, strings, Klezmer scales, rhythmic cells borrowed from minimalist composers. By the time For the first time arrived in 2021, the band's first album, they had assembled a sound that didn't fit neatly inside the post-punk frame even though that's where critics kept placing it.
The growth between For the first time and Ants from Up There is compressed and startling. A year separated the records. In that year the band moved from tight, almost confrontational post-punk toward something far more expansive, more orchestral, more emotionally permissive. "Basketball Shoes" could not have existed on the debut. It required everything the band had learned in between. Ten minutes long, it earns every second.
The Long Ending
I keep coming back to "Basketball Shoes." It builds with the patience of something that knows where it's going and isn't in a rush to get there, and when it finally arrives, when the strings come in and the whole thing lifts, it's one of those musical moments that makes you aware of your own body. Your breathing. The feeling in your chest. The particular kind of ache that only music can locate. I'm not sure I'll hear something like that again for a while. I'm not sure I'd want to, immediately. Some things need time to metabolise.
The ten minutes of that track are not constructed around a conventional emotional arc. There's no simple build to a climax. The song circles, revisits, extends. It behaves the way feeling actually behaves rather than the way songs are usually written to behave. That's a compositional choice that requires confidence, because it risks losing the listener every time it refuses to resolve. It doesn't lose the listener. The refusal to resolve is the point.
A Record That Stands Alone
What BC,NR gave us with Ants from Up There was a document of transformation in progress. The band becoming itself, then the band losing a member, then the band becoming something else. All of it compressed into a record that was already elegiac before any of the external events gave it a reason to be. Music that arrives in that condition, already mourning its own moment, is strange and valuable. I'll be returning to it for a long time.
The grief for Isaac Wood's departure is real, and writing about it at this distance, with the band having continued and released more music and built a new version of themselves that is also genuinely them, I can hold it alongside a genuine interest in what comes next. The record stands. It stands as one of the most emotionally complete things made by any British band in recent memory. Whatever the future holds for whoever BC,NR is now, Ants from Up There is what it is. That's enough. Sometimes a record is enough by itself.
