Back in 2017, if you’d asked Joe Bonamassa about the likelihood of a fifth Black Country Communion album, he’d have been far from certain. At that time, the band had just released their fourth album, IV, and ostensibly all was going well. Critics loved it. Fans loved it. The band were proud of it. But they still had ‘day jobs’, outside commitments – other lives, in other words – that had always stood between them and the ‘supergroup’ they all loved so much. How much longer could a side project be viable?
“That was fifty-fifty,” Bonamassa says now, looking back on the aftermath of IV. “And after [third album] Afterglow, that was when I would probably have given it a twenty per cent chance of ever firing up again. But then with the fourth record, we just started chatting and said let’s do it, you know.”
