Albums

Elanor Moss talks us through every track on her debut album “The Knife, The Needle,” out now on Merge Records. She traces “Fixer” from a single sitting at her kitchen table, the tape malfunction that reshaped “Improvisation,” and the George Saunders book that guided her to write by intuition until a voice emerged, then following that voice wherever it goes.

“Live at the Chapel” is a twenty-five-minute, four-track teaser from London folk interpreter Charlie Wheatley, the first chapter in a three-part project covering around forty songs. Recorded at Stone Nest, a nineteenth-century Welsh church in London’s West End, the unconventional lineup of guitar, viola and two double basses fills the space with serious ambience. A wonderfully fresh and vibrant EP.

Mary Gauthier’s “Reckoning” strips things down to voice, guitar and occasional harmonica, her rawest album yet, co-produced with Neilson Hubbard and modelled on Springsteen’s Nebraska. Co-written with Jaimee Harris, Ben Roberts and Lori McKenna among others, the songs build around characters who arrive at pivotal moments and face reckonings that define their lives and communities.

Jake Xerxes Fussell’s sixth album, The Old Beloved Path, is his most delicately considered release yet — his most elegant and unassuming. Seemingly easy in nature and quite light for the first few listens, the album then works its magic and its subtlety lingers in the mind: yet more proof Fussell is still only getting better.

Sairie’s long-awaited debut, Beneath the Spreading Tree, sounds like a lo-fi Pentangle with an added layer of hauntological strangeness. The Brighton trio’s lead vocals make songs seem haunted by their own flickering shadows. This ageless-sounding debut is starkly in its beauty and richly rewarding.

Birdvox are a kind of supergroup, and on ‘Shamming the Drama’ the quartet may, at any given time, backtrack into traditional Scottish folk, sidestep into pulsing disco beats, and lean into glitchy, blissful electronica. Their debt to traditional music gives their sound a unique edge, but of all the many elements that make Birdvox sound like no other band, that sense of community might be one of the most important.

Jarrett Gilgore and Anthony Pirog’s “Between The Earth and Where” is a fine tributary to this great river of human achievement, compelling in its subtle warmth and discreet lyricism. Pirog’s guitar forms finely latticed patterns for Gilgore’s sensuous blowing; dreamy saxophone flutters and spirals at the edge of consciousness. Two empathetic and exploratory young men playing a delicate, nocturnal blues.

Falmouth’s Blind Yeo follow Cornwall’s tradition of wonky inventiveness on “The Lemoine Point,” which surges with baked, euphoric Krautrock riffs and pantheistic ancient worship. Founded by singer/guitarist Will Greenham, the loose collective is based out of The Cornish Bank, the Falmouth venue Greenham co-founded. Blind Yeo are doing more than most to keep Cornwall weird.

On his second album, “Mudlark Ballads”, Dublin singer Macdara Yeates unearths little-known relics of the city’s musical history, his arrangements more confident and varied than on 2024’s “Traditional Singing from Dublin”. His ability to capture the mood of a song is second to none; they are valuable treasures in his hands. 

Le Ren’s “Don’t Be Funny Without Me” is a phenomenally powerful album. The arrangements expand beyond the spareness of her earlier releases, with fiddle, drums and layered harmonies; this is one you will return to again and again.

Emma Lucia and Ship Says Om (Jenny Gillespie Mason) talk us through “Djuphjärtad,” their collaborative four-song EP blending Nordic-rooted folk melodies with ambient experimental textures. Using nature-based field recordings, synths, and organic instrumentation, the Bay Area musicians move between intimate songs of romantic anticipation and elemental sound meditations.

Baby Dee’s “Child of Joy” is her first album in 11 years, reworking songs from her catalogue for accordion. Where piano and harp once carried them, the accordion makes them preciously intimate and impossibly vast. Dee is the great chronicler of everyday miracles, written in alphabets of light — the eye of a poet, the hands of a carpenter.