New album: The English singer-songwriter returns with her fifth LP, following 2019’s No Words Left, with a triumph-against-adversity comeback of beautiful piano-based songs fuelled by difficulty and yet also hope
Read moreCosmo Sheldrake: Eye To The Ear
New album: A mesmeric new experimental release of 21 short tracks by the British producer, musician and soundscape artist who uses field recordings of nature, human and “more-than-human voices”, traditional instrumentation and electronic production
Read moreGrace Cummings: Ramona
New album: Slow, inexorable, compelling beauty in the powerful voice of the Melbourne singer-songwriter and actor, here, following 2022’s extraordinary Storm Queen, with a less raw, more lavishly orchestrated sound and grandeur, to express themes such as grief and self-destruction and emotional violence
Read moreDana Gavanski: LATE SLAP
New album: Deftly original, wry, humorous, gently dreamy, brilliantly oddball folk-pop by the London-based Canadian-Serbian artist in this third LP with a theme of tenderness in a desensitising world, playing out tensions between negative cynicism and despair against positive openness and trust
Read moreJane Weaver: Love In Constant Spectacle
New album: A gorgeous new LP by the Merseyside artist, with her distinctive blend of tender, melancholic synth-pop, but here also some avant-garde jazz and gently surreal, newer pastures of otherworldly, vivid psychedelia, and a first guest producer in the form of the excellent John Parish
Read moreAdrianne Lenker: Bright Future
New album: The Big Thief singer-songwriter returns with another solo folk album – minimally exquisite, delicate, at times heartbreakingly, with a title that is ambiguous - a future that could be beautiful and dazzling, but also blinding and burning
Read moreHannah Frances: Keeper of the Shepherd
New album: A beautiful, brilliantly experimental folk fifth album by the Chicago singer-songwriter, with seven songs of alternative structures, guitar tunings, grief, loss and dizzying displacement, intimacy and energy, lyrical images of caves, shepherds, sheep, ribs and rivers
Read moreSam Lee: Songdreaming
New album: The British folk singer-songwriter, best known for The Detectorists theme song, returns with a gorgeous, bucolically beautiful fourth LP, swelled by orchestral strings, with songs of love, loss, Albion-tinged melancholy, with ecological disaster looming
Read moreVarious artists - Africatown, AL: Ancestor Sounds
New album: A beautifully evocative, documentary compilation of anonymous spontaneous performances and field recordings from descendants of slaves in a northern section of the city of Mobile, Alabama, one of the last places in the US to receive slave ships
Read moreYOVA: Dreamcatchers
New album: An alluring, breathy, sensual, supernaturalistic LP by the duo of Jova Radevska and Mark Vernon, with a theme delving into the unconscious, for lost and unrealised dreams and ideals, and how they are nurtured, then realised, abandoned or destroyed
Read moreHurray For The Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive
New album: New Orleans-based Alynda Segarra’s ninth album is a classy, intelligent emotional mix of country and folk, travelling in time and place reflecting on her youth, family, community, ups and downs, and life’s passing
Read moreReal Estate: Daniel
New album: Warm, engaging, easygoing alt-folk-country-pop by the Brooklyn band with their sixth album, here given a name as if a person, but also produced by acclaimed songwriter Daniel Tashian at the famous RCA Studio A, in Nashville
Read moreLes Amazones d'Afrique: Musow Danse
New album: A joyous, vibrant, powerful, life-affirming third LP by the West African Mali collective female artists, mixing traditional, rich African vocal harmonies with electronica, dance, funk and folk of course no shortage of feminist fervour
Read moreGrandaddy: Blu Wav
New album: This serene, sixth LP from California’s Jason Lytle brings that meltingly beautiful melancholic voice, slow, caressed guitars, country pedal steel (Max Hart) and some Beach Boys echoes with themes of loneliness dotted with droll humour
Read moreWilliam Doyle: Springs Eternal
New album: Superbly crafted, innovative ‘art-pop for the anthropocene’ by the innovative British artist, with landscaped sounds in a whirlpool of clever invention, narratives threading through an existential lifespan of gorgeous turns through this follow-up to 2021’s Great Spans of Muddy Time
Read moreThe Miserable Rich: Overcome
New album: The likeable Brighton string-led collective return with their first studio LP in nearly 13 years, a wordplay-rich, drily humorous, catchy, poignant collection of vivid storytelling via chamber pop and indie folk
Read moreDeclan McKenna: What Happened To The Beach?
New album: Less overtly political than his previous work, but still satirical and now more personal, this is jaunty, quirky, eccentric, eclectic pop by the 25-year-old LA-based, Enfield-raised singer-songwriter, experimenting like a 1960s psychedelic troubadour.
Read moreHelado Negro: PHASOR
New album: Finding that sweet spot with smooth, mellow Latin rhythms in an experimental mix of folk, jazz and electronica, the American artist of Ecuadorian Roberto Carlos Lange’s eighth studio album one of gentle, melting joy
Read moreKaty Kirby: Blue Raspberry
New album: Following 2021’s strong debut Cool Dry Place, the Texas singer-songwriter returns with another collection of intelligent, sharply observed numbers with beautiful clarity of voice, fine balance of instrumentation, unflinching honesty, great turn of phrase, and powerful melodies
Read moreNailah Hunter: Lovegaze
New album: Slow, sensual, simmering, lingeringly beautiful numbers in this debut LP of experimental, ambient, will-o'-the-wisp, dream-like quality by the Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer and harpist with Belize ancestry
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