Steve Gunn’s music is not always easy to write about. A big part of the Pennsylvania native and adopted Brooklynite’s unique appeal is his ability to create songs that seem as light as air but carry with them the weight of imagination, layers of process and finely-crafted moods. For a couple of decades now, he has been making music that skirts genre boundaries and courts mystery.
The songs on Daylight Daylight frequently escape their chamber-folk mould and make excursions into low-key art-rock and occasionally jazz. This is music that slowly pitches around on a rolling sea, or swoops in hazy air. There is a languid folk-rock rhythm section and enveloping strings of the kind found on those Joe Boyd-produced albums of the late 60s and early 70s, particularly evident on the Nick Drake stylings of Hadrian’s Wall. Opener Nearly There is a lesson in sustained, quiet intensity built around the simplest of strummed chords and drawn-out string section.
Gunn lets each of his songs stretch out, mostly to the five, six or seven-minute mark. He doesn’t use gimmicks or pyrotechnics to hold the listener’s attention because he doesn’t have to. He creates a compelling atmosphere through the layers of instrumentation and the quiet power of his singing. Morning on K Road begins with gentle fingerpicking and minimal percussion, and pulls you in with enigmatic lyrics and a slow but inexorable melodic progression. Here Nick Macri’s upright bass bears comparison to Danny Thompson’s work on John Martyn’s Solid Air, and there is something distinctly Martyn-esque in the way Gunn’s songs develop along unassuming lines into moments of surprise and wonder.
Another Fade’s guitar is impressionistic and almost jazzy, with hints of the more experimental side of the American primitives. Gunn’s vocals are close and breathy, and the musical backdrop shimmers, haunts and hypnotises. Gunn rarely paints his musical landscapes in primary colours; instead, these songs are decorated with glints of amber, swathes of grey that turn to silver, the subtle hues of dusk or early morning, music that shifts like the weather. Closing track A Walk again gives us an example of Gunn’s hard-to-pin-down guitar style, flitting between delicately patterned fingerpicking and propulsive chords.
The spacy and occasionally discordant sounds that trip in and out of the title track (including a distorted electric guitar), as well as the gulping, swooping string passages, hint at more lysergic influences, but even here, Gunn’s sincere songwriting and soulful singing remain the focal point. The more straightforward Loon thrives on lightness, and has something that resembles a traditional song structure: the brief repetition of the chorus sounds like a moment of clarity, an opening in the clouds.
Daylight Daylight marks something of a new beginning for Gunn. After a long partnership with Matador, he has switched labels to No Quarter and is enjoying the greater freedom that comes with being on a smaller and more independent label. The switch seems to have borne immediate fruit on Daylight Daylight, an engrossing album of dignified beauty.
Daylight Daylight (November 7th, 2025) No Quarter