The death of the mainstream band: Black Country, New Road reviewed

Twitter was awash with mockery last week, after Adam Levine, the singer of the American group Maroon 5, was interviewed on Apple Music and told Zane Lowe: ‘It’s funny, when the first Maroon 5 album came out there were still other bands. I feel like there aren’t any bands any more, you know?’ Out came the outraged, citing their favourite bands with fanbases numbering in the dozens. What about the fertile deep sludge scene based around Pimple Nose Records of Butt Wipe, Montana, eh? Then there were the K-Pop stans, demanding BTS — a seven-piece vocal group who, had they been formed in England in the 1990s, would clearly have been a boyband — be recognised as functionally equivalent to the Rolling Stones (there’s no moral judgment there, BTS stans. Just the fact that, to be a band, you have to play some instruments).

Taken in context, though, Levine’s comments were perfectly reasonable. Bands now exist on the periphery. In Levine’s world —the absolute middle of the road; the very heart of the mainstream — new bands have disappeared. When recording industry revenues began declining with the advent of digital music, the major labels began signing solo acts instead — they’re so much cheaper to launch — and never bothered to return to bands when the Spotify money started streaming back in.

All of which leaves us in a place where Black Country, New Road, the most acclaimed new band of 2021, are so far from the mainstream that they could catch a flight to it, and still need to rent a car for a six-hour drive at the other end. This London septet — with sax and violin prominent in the mix — combine various strands of English experimental rock (there are echoes of the Canterbury scene, Van Der Graaf Generator, the Fall) into something that, if not new, is without a direct competitor at the moment.