The Latest
“Stash,” the second album from BCMC — the Chicago guitar-and-keys duo of Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — pulls a range of styles from their minimalist set-up. More excitable than 2023’s “Foreign Smokes,” the musicians are happy to explore dynamically within a song. This is a generous, joyous album, brimming with life, energy and a real love of music.
Two Runner announce their second album, “PORCHLIGHT”, out August 28th via Gar Hole Records, and share new single and video “Strawberry Rhinestone”. Paige Anderson marks a transitional collection — goodbyes to a longtime musical partner and a decade-long relationship — though the songs stay warm and steady, resolute and tender-hearted, with the earnestness that has earned Two Runner years of praise.
Carson McHone shares a video for “The Canvas” and announces her first UK and European headline dates since “Pentimento”, her acclaimed third album. Crossing the Atlantic in August and September, she builds a band with Hollow Hand’s Max Kinghorn-Mills, plays three performances as a trio with Kinghorn-Mills and multi-disciplinary artist Fliss Horrocks, and takes in a slot at End of the Road Festival.
Frankie Archer’s debut album “The Dance of Death” combines traditional balladry with very contemporary-sounding electronica, resulting in a sound unlike anyone else. Built around the ideas of death and mortality, it is anything but one-dimensionally depressing. Archer is a one-of-a-kind talent with a huge career ahead of her.
This week’s Monday Morning Brew is free to all. Featuring Elanor Moss, Natalie Wildgoose, Magic Tuber Stringband, Shannon Lay, Alela Diane, Camille Camille, Anna McLuckie, Charlie Franklin, Fruit Bats, Diket, Black Duck & Elena Setién, Eva May, Creekbed Carter Hogan, Johnny Bell, Alex Dupree and lots more.
The Hanging Stars frontman Richard Olson pulls out all the stops for his Off the Shelf, gathering ten cherished objects — a Swedish utopian poster, his father’s signed Alan Lomax book, a Toronto-bought Martin 12-string, The Byrds on 7″. Revealing, moving and humorous, it ranks among the series’ very best, laying bare an intense passion for music.
Belfast’s Alana Henderson swaps her signature cello for tenor guitar on new single “Appetite”, turning inward with striking clarity. The song traces the confusion of misreading your own appetite, its restless writing moving between wit and self-reproach while a faint country inflection and pedal steel shimmer lend a bittersweet lift — intimate, intelligent and emotionally precise. Watch the accompanying video, a silent-movie-inspired black-and-white film with a Wes-Anderson-gone-goth sensibility.
On “These Are The Days That Turn Into Years”, their seventh studio album, Pharis & Jason Romero, following their 2022 release, channel four years of living, touring, parenting and banjo-building into their most open-hearted set yet. Tracked in their riverside Horsefly barn, it feels lived-in and luminous — a pure rootsy joyride that will send you straight back to the opening track.
Alex Dupree returns on August 14th with “Talking to the Dog,” his first album since 2022’s “Thieves,” released via Oklahoma’s Scissor Tail Records. Produced by Michael Krassner and featuring Jolie Holland, it’s the work of a poet-songwriter taking Hank Williams’s offhand line somewhere stranger and more visionary. Ahead of it, he shares lead track “New Meaning.”
“Sam Carter Sings Nic Jones,” recorded live at Celtic Connections, is a faithful, generous tribute to one of the UK’s finest folk musicians. Carter knows these songs inside out, and he delivers them with a real passion, as well as the care they deserve. It’s a record that hands the tradition on, proof that the cycle of folk music and storytelling is in good health.
Luluc share “No One Else’s Pen”, the second single from their sixth album “Sweet Thief”, out 10th July on Community Music. Steve Hassett calls it a big old love song and a paean to living and loving with integrity, gratitude and presence of mind, set to a video built around printmaker Fleur Rendell’s artwork.
Shearwater share “Slugs In The Marigolds”, the third single from “The New World”, and it’s a side of the band we’ve not heard before: slinky and carefree. Beginning mid-stride, as if caught playing in an empty warehouse, it lets Doug Wieselman’s casually beautiful saxophone summon the ghost of Roxy Music, the loose, sunny feeling playing against a darker lyric.
MMM (Gayle Brogan, Elizabeth Still, Nick Jonah Davis) provide a fascinating, deep listening experience on “Lunistice Alignments”. The record covers a lot of sonic ground, each of the six tracks occupying a very different space and mood. Somehow sounding ancient and contemporary, light and dense: MMM ask for close attention and repay it in full.
Chicago trio Black Duck and Basque musician Elena Setién announce their self-titled debut, Black Duck With Elena Setién, out August 28th via Thrill Jockey. Born from a run of improvised Spanish shows and recorded fast in Chicago, the album lands with lead single “Land of the Many Eyes” — four players conversing at the boundaries of improvisation and composition.
Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and producer Mike Simonetti have shared their cover of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See A Darkness,” from the collaborative EP, out 12th June via Smugglers Way. The accompanying video, starring Taylor and David Bredin with Jarvis Cocker and Sian Ahern, plays like a televised Samuel Beckett play.
Shabason & Krgovich’s “Four Days in June” is an album of subtle, often delicate layers, borrowing from country, sophisticated AOR, laid-back jazz and chamber-pop. This is music that settles on you gently, sometimes like a fine rain or sometimes like dust — songs that patiently take stock as their creators slip into middle age. Deceptively light, wholly profound art.
Elanor Moss announces her debut album “The Knife, The Needle,” out August 21st on Merge Records, and shares the single and video “Sarah Waiting in the Car.” Across nine songs, Moss renders joy and pain in exquisite peals of psych-folk, her darkly-dreamed vignettes offering an understanding of healing as a process, rather than an object one obtains. This album is sure to be on many End-of-year lists.