By Truman Sebanc

November 18, 2025

So. It’s 3 in the morning, 10 hours removed from a 16 ounce americano. I can’t sleep. What I can do, though, is think about music, and after turning thoughts around in my head for an hour, I scramble out of bed and end up here, at my desk, word processor at the ready.

A band I’ve tended to like quite a bit over the past few years has been the lauded group Black Country, New Road, who over 7 years and 3 studio albums have undergone a rough, varied, and impactful career trajectory. Impactful for the already-widespread influence the act has had on alternative rock, varied because of the genre- and tone-shifts seen from their earliest single through each successive release. Rough for the sudden shock departure of their lead vocalist, Isaac Wood, days before the release of Ants From Up There, what many consider to be the band’s finest work.

Wood’s withdrawal from the band is not the crux of my article here. But it is the catalyst.

You see, Wood, like all the great ones, is a sad, skinny, literate, pallid, brown-haired twenty-something who meanders on about love and melancholy with a near-gratingly distinct voice. Men of this archetype tend, for a whole host of reasons, to be consistently favored among the artistic canon, not just of popular music, but of all sorts of media. Music, specifically though, is where I make my point.

RateYourMusic.com (RYM), a popular forum/aggregator for the self-appointed online music intelligentsia, displays album and song charts which, based on user ratings, rank every single release that appears in their database. As such, the consensus “canon” of the website is easy to distinguish. It is also easy to distinguish biases within this supposed canon. For instance, out of the site’s top 100 albums of all time, 93 are male-led. The site used to be even worse in this regard, but a surge in popularity and influx of younger, more diverse users can be seen to similarly diversify the site-wide averages.

Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road, their second album, currently stands as RYM’s best album of the current decade, something I personally agree with and also see critics echo in professional reviews. It’s all up to personal preference, of course, and I’ve got many otherwise-trustworthy friends who don’t see the light as I do, but that’s all good. The problem lies 3 years after the album’s 2022 release.

After Wood’s exit, the six remaining members of the band had to manage the change. They opted to stay together and, out of respect, discontinue their Wood-penned songs. They spent time furiously writing new material, and the next year put together a stunning live album showcasing their collective compositional approach, titled Live at Bush Hall. It took 2 years for the next studio album to appear, in 2025, one Forever Howlong. This new album features elaborate, detailed arrangements in a style which continues the trend away from harshness, towards orchestration, that the band has followed since their first showing. You can hear the improvements in musicianship, the collective effort, and the Joanna Newsom influence in their meandering, lush harmonies.

Forever Howlong, though, came out to a much dimmer reception than its studio predecessor. It could be the apparent, however slight, decline in cohesion between tracks, or admittedly weaker lyricism. I see these flaws, and recognize the near impossibility of matching Ants From Up There’s towering heights and emotional expression. Minor drop-offs and minutiae don’t justify the steep declines in aggregate ratings from one project to the next, though. Forever Howlong sits at number 453 on the RYM decade-long chart that is topped by Ants From Up There, to give context.

BCNR, in its popularity and acclaim, invites vehement detractors, and maybe this project’s more noticeable shortcomings have bolstered those frustrated by the band’s output. This still does not explain how the band’s first album, the aptly-titled For The First Time, a messy, raw thing ripe with flaws amidst its brilliance, has escaped this level of disapproval. The debut features a much less-refined sound all-around, arguably weaker on the fronts of production quality, musicianship, and songwriting. Still, on that same decade chart, RateYourMusic lists For The First Time among the 20 best albums of the 2020s.

The crux of the issue is that Black Country, New Road, after their frontman’s departure, is now headed by 3 different lead vocalists, all women. The crux is that Forever Howlong is a distinctly feminine record, full of idealistic, flowing beauty, of female perspectives and narratives, and far, far removed from the masculine tendency the band became known for, the masculine tendency that plagues alternative rock as a genre.

RYM user somuchswagthatitswasted wrote a short review of Forever Howlong that has stuck in my mind since I first read it.

He wrote, The bleeding emo scarring of Isaac Wood and the subtly radiant heart of the 3 ladies that took his reins is for better or worse a world of difference and the fact that the ratings of this and “Ants” are so violently opposed speaks a thousand words to the current macho rockism hegemony of RYM. BCNR died for our sins.

Macho Rockism Hegemony. There are, for certain, better and more specific ways to describe the issue at hand. Nonetheless, these 3 words have stuck in my mind for months. They have made me question the music I like, the music I listen to, the music I was raised on. They should make anyone question. What is it we consider valuable, in art or otherwise? Why does it, still today, trend white, trend male? How do these societal biases influence our own tastes, our own experiences of art? To answer any of these questions, one must restructure their ways of thought about music, their ways of appreciating it.

That a collective value is placed upon masculinity in art, particularly in music, is undeniable. The male domination of the music industry is a problem continually reckoned with, and the rock genre is particularly guilty of this persistent dominance. The macho rockism hegemony is real, and distorts how we listen to and value music. Critical questions about gender and race are important to conversations about music, important because without recognition and analysis of inherent and personal biases, those biases act unhindered.   

A responsible listener should question not only what they enjoy or dislike in music, but the underlying reasons for those interpretations. Oftentimes one can discover their own biases only through internal questioning and reflection, and uncovering, say, a tendency to dismiss femme rockers as less talented or original, can be the first step in addressing and correcting one’s internalized sexism. Unfortunately, much of the bias in popular music is systemic and less easily-corrected, so as listeners, we must be aware and seek to address how the misogyny inherent in the music industry and media determines what music is made available to us, made to seem important, or just made to begin with.

All of these questions are on top of many other forms of biases in music such as the ill-defined “album” being treated as the default musical medium, the fact of white rock music being an arguable (or not-so-arguable) form of cultural appropriation, the domination of Western musical tendencies (12TET, for example), and a whole lot more that I don’t have the musicology degree to speak confidently about. I’m not an expert, and I don’t have concrete answers. I’m a student, with questions, who cares about the music they listen to, and wants others to care and question in a similar way.

It’s getting close to 6, and I’ve got midterms to study for. 

Peace, 
Truman