Black Country, New Road

Influences

• Slint — Wood explicitly cited the Louisville math-rock pioneers as the blueprint for their earliest dynamic builds and vocal delivery. You can hear it all over 'Science Fair' in the quiet-loud tension and spoken-word deadpan before the guitars explode. They took the 'Spiderland' dynamic shifts and threw a violin right in the middle of them.
• Steve Reich — The band met studying music and cited Reich's minimalist phasing techniques as the rhythm engine for their compositions. The interlocking, repetitive piano and guitar figures running underneath 'Opus' and 'Sunglasses' come straight out of 'Music for 18 Musicians'. It turns what could be standard post-punk into polyrhythmic endurance tests.
• Arcade Fire — The band openly pointed to 'Funeral' as their primary sonic compass when writing 'Ants From Up There'. You hear it in the soaring, tear-stained chamber swells and group-chanted crescendos on tracks like 'The Place Where He Inserted the Blade'. They took that mid-2000s indie orchestral grandiosity and stripped out the stadium polish.
• Scott Walker — Wood name-checks Walker directly in the lyrics of 'Sunglasses' and modeled his dramatic, baritone vibrato on Walker's late-60s solo run. You hear that avant-pop theatricality in how the vocal melodies hang unresolved over dark string beds. It gave the group an unhinged, old-world dramatic presence nobody else on the Windmill scene had.
• Sufjan Stevens — Kershaw and Hyde regularly credit 'Illinois' and Stevens' baroque pop orchestrations for teaching them how to arrange woodwinds and brass around simple pop chords. The horn charts and fluttery flute motifs on 'Chaos Space Marine' pull straight from Sufjan's 50 States playbook. It is pure, unabashed indie-orchestral arrangement.