So many albums, so little time. It’s both the blessing and the curse of the music writers of this world that we get to hear new music every day. A lot of what we hear – and this is a testament to the creative folks out there – is very good indeed. Some of it is truly excellent. But listening to such a great volume of music has its downside: some genuinely good stuff gets pushed to one side by dint of being less immediate or less showy than its peers. It’s our job to listen, to listen twice and to listen again. This year, the job has been a joy, but it’s been as tough as ever to whittle the best thirty or so albums of the year down to a top ten.
There have been incredible live albums (Bill Callahan), excellent comebacks from old favourites (Innocence Mission; Trust Fund; Darren Hayman’s latest band New Starts), thrilling dispatches from Japan (SAICOBAB; Masayoshi Fujita) and Portugal (Ana Lua Caiano), experimental noise with its roots in Burkina Faso and Belgium (Avalanche Kaito) and haunted, dreamy, disconcerting British folk (Angeline Morrison, whose album OPHELIA originally came out in 2022 and is probably the year’s best reissue). All of these and more have made me sit up and catch my breath more than once. The fact that I’ve had to leave them out of my final ten makes me curse the arbitrary boundaries of the decimal numeric system. So here, with apologies, is the list.
Click on the title to read the original review.
Daisy Rickman – Howl
Part invocation from the psychedelic void, part pastoral ode to our weird history, part dreamlike landscape poem, Daisy Rickman’s masterpiece lit up the early part of the year, appearing as winter turned into spring.
Rickman plays more than a dozen instruments, creating a soundworld that is genuinely sui generis: while it borrows elements from experimental composition, weird folk, incantatory prog and hauntology, Howl sounds like nothing else, like a broadcast from a bucolic imaginary future. It also has some of the best artwork you’re ever likely to see on an album cover.
Milkweed – Folklore 1979
The experimental folk duo remain a mysterious, enlivening presence. Folklore 1979 sets the text of an academic journal published by The Folklore Society to a backdrop of decayed tape loops, Appalachian banjo, unexpected truncations and disconcerting blips. An acoustic guitar and vocals that range from the ethereal to the earthy anchor these short, linked songs in (or close to) the folk tradition, but the means by which they are made bears closer comparison to hip hop or plunderphonics. Milkweed are still the most exciting and inscrutable band on the British folk scene.
Elijah Minnelli – Perpetual Musket
Elijah Minnelli might not be the first person to splice traditional English folk with dub and roots reggae, but he’s almost certainly the most effective. Perpetual Musket features a host of illustrious guest vocalists – including roots legend Little Roy on Vine and Fig Tree – but the vision is all Minnelli’s. A Peggy Seeger cover approved by the writer herself, an uncanny rendition of Soulcake, and an astonishing version of one of the most famous songs from Shakespeare’s Tempest are mirrored by a side of highly atmospheric dub. It’s startling, almost shocking, but also playful and highly satisfying.
Jacken Elswyth – At Fargrounds
Elswyth’s disregard of boundaries might at first seem like a successful exercise in iconoclasm, but rather than riding roughshod over those boundaries, her music occupies a place where they don’t exist, where the differences between contemporary composition, traditional melody and improvisation melt away, and the distinction between the making of music and the construction of instruments becomes fuzzy. Elswyth is a banjo-maker and banjo-player: in her music, the two disciplines convene with mesmerising and utterly refreshing results. Equally at home with intricate picking and lengthy drones, the tunes on At Fargrounds are celebrations of the banjo and all its implications and possibilities.
Isik Kural – Moon in Gemini
Kural is a Glasgow-based musician and composer with Turkish heritage. On Moon in Gemini, he paints his pictures using the muted palette of ambient and environmental music – think Brian Eno or Hiroshi Yoshimura – then overlays them with bright, vivid, pristine folk. There are shades of Virginia Astley, but also Sibylle Baier, and Kusal links everything together with such a lightness of touch that you begin to wonder why nobody has done this kind of thing before.
Laura J Martin – Prepared
Another album whose sound recalls that of Virginia Astley. Martin, however, takes it in a slightly different direction, towards the experimental art-pop of Talk Talk. Like Elswyth, the Liverpool-based Martin is an accomplished instrument-maker. Her craft has helped her to look at her flute ‘on a molecular level’, and this close attention to detail makes its way into her music, which is complex but full of heart. Augmented by piano, synths, mandolin and guitar, it is lush and rich and mysterious.
Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance
The London folk scene is currently home to an electrifying array of talent, based around ideas of experimentation, queerness and inclusivity. Acts like Goblin Band and Stick In the Wheel – both of whom released excellent albums this year – are at the forefront of the capital’s burgeoning scene, but if any one group best represents its loose, collaborational, exploratory appeal, it’s surely the Shovel Dance Collective, whose second album is full of breathtakingly current takes on traditional tunes, improvisational avant-folk weirdness, and a spirit that feels truly revolutionary.
Myriam Gendron – Mayday
Montreal’s Myriam Gendron is adored by the avant-garde and fans of folky singer-songwriting alike, and with good reason. Mayday’s quietly breathtaking songs play both camps off against each other with subtlety and nuance. She is unparalleled in the art of setting the listener up with a beautiful, Sandy Denny-esque melody before applying a small but important twist: sometimes it’s just an unexpected chord change or a switch from English to French, sometimes it’s the destabilising clatter of Jim White’s drums or Zoh Amba’s fierce, fluttering sax. Whatever the technique, the results are beautiful and moving.
Tucker Zimmerman – Dance of Love
Turns out that the best new find of the year is a man in his eighties. Zimmerman’s highly poetic, idiosyncratic outsider folk has been largely ignored by critics and the record buying public for the last half a century or so, but with the help of Big Thief and some intimate, eccentric songwriting, he has made the most warm and wonderful album of his career.
Landless – Lúireach
London’s folk scene might be hot right now, but Dublin’s has been in a great place for the last decade. The quartet of Lily Power, Méabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch add to the good work done by ØXN, John Francis Flynn and Lankum, with eerie four-part harmonies, drones, clavichords, singing bowls and Slovakian folk songs. Their second album is gripping, unnerving and addictive.
Best Series: Ceremonial Counties (Folklore Tapes)
And finally, I’ve been permitted an addendum: the prize for the best series of releases goes to the Folklore Tapes label, for their ongoing Ceremonial Counties project. There have been ten releases so far, each one representing the folk customs of two different English counties. The joy in the series comes in how differently the artists interpret the brief. The results are consistently interesting and always experimental. They have the feel of important archival documents, but are often visceral and wild and playful. The promise of more means that next year is already shaping up well.