This week’s Monday Morning Brew playlist includes music from The New Pornographers, Poor Creature, Sacred Paws, iyatraQuartet, Stranded Horse & Boubacar Cissokho, Spirit Fest, Dean Johnson, Marlon Williams, Hayden Pedigo and lots more.

It’s over five years since the last Sacred Paws album, but Jump Into Life is well worth the wait. It feels like the most fully realised example of their intriguing vision, tapping into a truly global set of influences to produce something complex and personal.

Dancing the Line is such a confident collection of songs; you can feel the ideas brimming in every sweep of Ultan O’Brien’s bow. Nothing is overdone or superfluous here; it is music in its purest state. I love it.

In the hands of Jonathan Nangle and the Crash Ensemble, something beautiful has emerged from the long gestation of ‘Blue Haze of Deep Time’, which should become a touchstone of the ‘slow music’ movement.

Currently on his solo Spring tour, watch Sam Carter performing his latest single, Long Time Travelling, a well-known rousing spiritual from the 19th-century American shape-note tunebook The Sacred Harp.

Folklore Tapes deliver one of the strongest and strangest in their Ceremonial County series. The Bohman Brothers provide the perfect primer for creating weird, place-specific atmospheres, while Jennifer Reid represents folk music as a living tradition, as entertaining as it is political.

New Thing, the scarily accomplished debut album from Avery Friedman, inhabits a complex emotional realm where nervousness can coexist with (and inform) ideas of sexiness, sadness, tenderness. Her world is fragile but appears to have arrived fully-formed.

Ahead of their European tour this May with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Mess Esque share the video for their latest single ‘Crow’s Ash Tree’. Whatever emotions shaped these songs, the results are quite unforgettable.

Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes is proof that you don’t have to forsake traditional aesthetic notions of melody to make something experimental…this is music deep and alluring enough to get lost in and sparse enough to find yourself in. 

Alabaster DePlume’s new LP, A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole, is both a soother, a coping mechanism and a healer. This one might be the State of the Nation address that truly resonates.

Featuring Ruth Clinton of Landless, Cormac MacDiarmada of Lankum and John Dermody of The Jimmy Cake, Poor Creature announce debut album ‘All Smiles Tonight’ and share video for ‘The Whole Town Knows’.

Listen to the latest Monday Morning Brew featuring Michael Hurley, James Yorkston, dbh, Cass McCombs, Micah Blue Smaldone, Sufjan Stevens, F.J. McMahon, Mendrugo, Zoé Basha, Will Lawrence, Lefty Parker, The Handsome Family, Anna St. Louis and Aurora Birch.