Green Man Festival’s New Bands stage has a special feeling. The way it’s set up means that the audience can see right through to the Welsh countryside beyond. If you stand in the right place, it’s as if the artists on stage are performing within the frame of a particularly exquisite piece of landscape art. This was where I first saw Natalie Wildgoose performing live, on a hot, hazy August afternoon last year. The crowd wasn’t huge, but those of us who made the effort were treated to a set of sweetly sighing folk music that seemed perfectly adapted to its rural surroundings. Hints of gothic strangeness and slight sidesteps into the surreal made sure that the congregation remained rapt. It wasn’t the first time I’d come across Wildgoose – I’d already reviewed her EP, Come Into the Garden – but it was the point at which her evident magic seemed to crystallise for me.
It’s been over a year now since Natalie Wildgoose made us sit up and take notice with that most recent EP, which drew deserved comparisons to Sibylle Baier and Adrianne Lenker. It’s clear from the first few notes of Rural Hours that she has spent that year wisely, honing her craft and condensing her sound. Like its predecessor, Rural Hours contains just six tracks, but the EP format seems like a perfect fit for Wildgoose at this stage: her songs are intentionally ephemeral, part of their appeal is the charged silence they leave in their wake, leaving you to imagine what else there might be. Here, the loose structures and unorthodox arrangements of her songs remain, but they are brought into focus by a small ensemble: Wildgoose’s piano is joined by Owen Spafford’s violin and the acoustic guitar of Chris Brain.
The ghostly half-minute opener, A Dream in Winter, drifts by like a fragment of ice in a mountain stream. It is followed by Nobody On The Path which, with its minimal guitar backing, manages to be both intense and completely tranquil. With its cast of crows and references to wild rain and leaden skies, this is music for the high moorlands and windswept hills – a fiddle solo twists and flips erratically like the display flight of a lapwing – and it makes sense that Wildgoose spends much of her time in the Yorkshire countryside. In fact, the EP was recorded in a bothy in the Yorkshire Dales.
River Days seems like the most conventionally structured song, with perhaps a hint of Nick Drake to it, but the piano does unexpected things, scuttling about at will under the sweet vocals and softly strummed guitar. Sybil, a meandering and impressionistic piano ballad, takes its inspiration from the Sibylline Oracles and shows Wildgoose’s maturation as a songwriter. The short but powerful Wind Callers is a mesmerising, wordless journey through a blustery landscape, where gouts of fiddle and dashes of acoustic guitar are blown about like smoke.
A sense of place is clearly an important consideration for Wildgoose: her songs are filled with unnamed but keenly felt wildernesses. The closest she gets to explicitly identifying a place in her lyrics is on the final song, In the North. While the piano plays a slightly woozy refrain, she conjures up a vivid picture of moors and valleys, grouse and wild deer. Here the landscape acts almost as the singer’s conscience: it is a melancholy place, but a comforting one. The geographical areas of The North and The City (Wildgoose spends much of her time in London) are set up in direct contrast to one another, and the narrator is buffeted by natural forces from one to the other, at home in both, or neither. That feeling of windblown impulsiveness is present throughout Rural Hours, where Natalie Wildgoose’s songs remain as untamed and rootless as ever, just more finely-drawn and more expertly realised.
Rural Hours (April 15th, 2026) state51
Pre-Order: https://nataliewildgoose.bandcamp.com/album/rural-hours
Upcoming live shows:
16 APR // Cambridge, Storey’s Field Centre*
17 APR // Kendal, Brewery Arts*
18 APR // Liverpool, The Tung Auditorium*
19 APR // Birmingham, Bradshaw Hall*
21 APR // Nottingham, Squire Performing Arts Centre*
22 APR // Glasgow, Cottiers Theatre*
23 APR // Leeds, Brudenell Social Club (supporting Chris Brain)
24 APR // York, Pocklington Arts Centre*
25 APR // Hebden Bridge, Trades Club*
14 MAY // The Great Escape
19 MAY // London, Stoke Newington Old Church [Headline]
22 MAY // London, MOTH Club (supporting Chris Brain)
23 MAY // Andover, Late Spring Folk Festival
24 JUL // Latitude Festival
26 JUL // Deer Shed Festival
*Supporting LYR