For the First Time

A record that far surpasses the necessity of any and all comparisons. With their highly-anticipated record, this ballistic band birthed from the Brixton Windmill have constructed their own world, where self-abnegation abounds and anxiety festers, yet experimental ingenuity shines a light through all its darkness.

A product of its time, it will unsettle and confuse you, and there are even moments that feel poignant. That is why they will be remembered as an important band, and this album a significant milestone in modern guitar music.

Black Country, New Road’s seriousness and determined intellectualism is sometimes to their detriment.

The meshing of classically trained and self-taught players adds depth to the band's sound, creating a unique concoction of precise technical skill and raw, almost primal passion, leading to an unpredictable instrumental delight.

The young seven-piece have since progressed at warp-speed, here passing the full-length test with confidence. [Mar 2021, p.90]

Black Country, New Road are no gods, but this inventive and likeable album should earn them a million or so disciples.

Their peak may be years away yet, but this is still some of the most exciting music you’ll hear until then; I’m not sure what more you could ask of a debut.

For the first time is usually nonsensical, frequently transcendent, and compulsively listenable. Everything that sprung to mind is on the wax here, but BC, NR don’t forget to make it catchy and groovy. In nailing that balance, they’ve given us the year’s first capital-G Great record.

Black Country, New Road showcases immense disregard for standard musical structures and an affinity for shrieking, discordant noise. Unlike their peers, they rely less frequently on jolting stops and starts, instead relying on gradual jazz and post-rock buildups.

Their portentous crescendos and surges of Jewish klezmer music set the pace, making post-rock sound improbably carnivalesque. That none of their experiments feel gimmicky speaks to a diverse and inquisitive musicianship.

For the First Time maintains a well-tempered intensity refined in its delivery but honest in its angst. Black Country, New Road show us what a "rock band" or "rock outfit" can achieve on their debut. For those bands labeled as experimental, we now have an expectation and a new benchmark.

They delivered neither a classic nor an embarrassing flop that revealed them as a flavour-of-the-week fancy, but just a pretty good album with room to improve.

It just feels tedious and predictable. Portentous twangs of guitar? Tick. Shivery percussion? Tick. Screeches of feedback? Tick. A frontman who delivers lyrics (rambling prose) in a croaky, squawking gasp that recalls Mark E Smith? Tick.

For The First Time is ferocious and endlessly intelligent, highly considered and wildly improvised, eked out with bristling tension and set alight with a burning intensity and a knowing smile.

If the interplay between the band’s instruments makes gleeful mincemeat of genre, singing guitarist Isaac Wood’s equally remarkable lyrics regularly float to the top of the mix. Half-spoken, half-sung, they riff on granular scene references (“I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi”) and Gen-Z witticisms, but pack in plenty of timeless tenderness and anomie.