Ants From Up There & The Future of Black Country, New Road

By Will Ingman

On February 4th, 364 days after the release of For the first time, British post-everything band Black Country, New Road released their sophomore effort, Ants From Up There. It’s a sophisticated, diverse, and sublimely self-referential album, trading the sharp and angular melodies of For the first time for a rounder and more relaxed sound.

There’s a tendency among acts like Black Country, New Road to struggle with separating their identity from the style they first became known for — sorry, black midi — but that issue isn’t present on Ants From Up There. This is unmistakably a Black Country, New Road album. Touches of For the first time still creep at the edges of the new sound, no longer the focus but most certainly still a factor. 

On tracks like “Chaos Space Marine,” the album’s standout first single, the dissonance that colored For the first time is finally resolved, used to punctuate the endings of verses before cascading into its sweeping, orchestral chorus. It’s enough to grab a listener’s ear but doesn’t quite embody the pure mania of their last album. If anything, Ants From Up There is an answer to that mania, a resulting depressive episode in both style and subject. Narratively, the band plays with deeply personal themes of codependency, loss, attachment, and longing. The Concorde supersonic airplane that appears in the album’s cover art serves as its largest metaphor, a flagrant overinvestment of resources that its architects could never divorce themselves from, a 100-ton monument to the sunk-cost fallacy. Wood sings (a notable development from For the first time’s spoken vocals) almost exclusively in symbolism, cloaking himself in pop culture and poetic devices, as though he is too afraid of vulnerability to speak from his own perspective. Still, there is a level of raw introspection  in the lyrics of Ants From Up There, And while it steeps itself in cross-textuality, the portraits of lovelorn weakness and helpless codependency it paints are as genuine as they are stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful. 

Instrumentally, Black Country, New Road find themselves exploring deeper influences of jazz, post-rock, and modern pop on Ants From Up There. No longer allergic to major-key harmonies, they openly embrace exuberance and hope  in their composition, while never losing the complex interweaving and contrast that gave For the first time its moments of powerful disquietude. Here, those techniques are instead employed to radiate exuberance and richness, and to embody the heart of the album, a concept drummer Charlie Wayne describes in an Apple Music interview as simply “being in [a] room, making music with my friends.”

The degree to which Black Country, New Road toy with technique and feel — whether that be through Wayne’s forward-in-the-mix disco drums on “Snow Globes,” or the instrumental tribute to saxophonist Lewis Evans’s uncle in “Mark’s Theme,” — eclipses even their prior work on For the first time. The twinkling glockenspiel and marimba melodies, six-part vocal harmonies, and countless other stylistic decisions would be unimaginable on their previous record. Ants From Up There is an experimentalist’s Garden of Eden, unified and varied all at once. It's much an album as it is an environment, an emotion, a feeling that just words could never describe. 

Efforts to describe the feelings of modern experimental albums like this one have an unhealthy tendency to denature and devolve into what can only be called a dick-measuring contest between indie-heads, to see who can say the words “Swans,” or “Godspeed You! Black Emperor,” or, heaven forbid, “Slint,” before anyone else does. At times, it feels like an artificial barrier of entry to potential newcomers, a stamped-sheet-metal sign that reads, “You can’t like this if you’ve never heard Spiderland.” It’s bullshit, obviously, but on Ants From Up There, Black Country, New Road have created an album that pole-vaults that barrier with an Olympics-level intensity. 

Put simply, this album is incomparable. It is trailblazing, outstanding, and it is unlike anything that has ever been released before it. In twenty years, this will be the new Spiderland. In twenty years, someone will tell someone else they can’t listen to the 34th Xiu Xiu album without listening to Ants From Up There first. It’s no wonder, then, that “Basketball Shoes,” the oldest song on the album, described by bassist Tyler Hyde as “a medley of the whole album…[that] touches on all the themes we’ve been exploring,” takes nearly thirteen whole minutes, almost three-hundred miles of distance in a Concorde jet, from the window of which we all look like Ants From Up There.

There is an elephant in the room here, of course — a topic danced around by Metacritic and hardly touched on by NME, clearly intertwined with the material of the album but gradually overpowering discussions of its musical content. The unexpected departure of frontman Isaac Wood four days before the album’s release (which, had it occurred after the release, would have been far less unexpected) has irrevocably changed the way Ants From Up There will be discussed in the future, and recontextualized nearly every inch of the album’s material. Wood’s departing statement, in keeping with the presentation of Ants From Up There, might not feel entirely out of place if backed by the soft waltz-styling of “Concorde,” clearly sincere and vulnerable but still shielded by a closing pop-culture reference. 

It may be worth considering, then, that Ants From Up There was another kind of departing statement for Isaac Wood, another sincere and vulnerable expression of his feelings towards music, towards the other members of the band, and perhaps towards himself. Ants From Up There says what he could not address in a single announcement. It is an elaborate and poetic description of his unconquerable fear, matched in equal measure by joy and gratitude towards both his bandmates and the audience. Perhaps the person in that Concorde jet, so imperceptibly far from that mountain, that object of desire that cannot be reached is someone who Wood wishes he could be, rather than someone he wishes to be with. 

At the end of “The Place Where He Inserted The Blade,” Wood asks the listener to “show [him] the fifth, and the cadence [they] want [him] to play,” a double-edged expression of codependency, most importantly between himself and the monumental expectations of a performer like him. “The Place” seems to be the most obvious expression of Wood’s inner turmoil, a man who is scared of a world where he is needed, who has, until now, held to his chest, where the wind can exist, who is scared and lost and freaking out in a burning house, with a Kanye song playing and a dirty soup-maker still in the sink. Making “The Place” his penultimate, unofficial goodbye statement feels like a very deliberate choice - the heart of the album, made in a room with his friends. Isaac suffered, Concorde flew, and now both can die free.