KLOF Mag’s Mixtapes and Shows page now features a persistent player — two new buttons, Play and Info, let you keep listening while browsing the archive, or swap between mixes freely. Older code going back to 2010 has also been updated. With over 450 mixes in the archive and new ones added weekly, it’s a good time to explore.

Our latest Mixtape opens to Frankie Archer, whose new album, The Dance of Death, is out today. We’ve also got new music from Zoh Amba, Simon Joyner, Johnny Bell, and a big finale from Brown Wimpenny. Plus: Iona Zajac, Stein Urheim, The Modern Folk, The Deadlians, Hack-Poets Guild, Naomi Alligator, Deer Scout, Josh Kimbrough, Nora Brown, anne annie, Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell, Robert Wyatt, Maxine Funke & more.

Emmett Kelly, Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney and Jim White have all done time in supergroups before. Could they handle it on a cold Tuesday night on a Bluetooth stereo in Glasgow? Alex Neilson gives an emphatic and unequivocal yes. Released in late 2024, “The Hard Quartet” carries all the messy, confounding joy of Dirty Three and Pavement, and makes you remember what you love about music.

New Mexico banjoist Johnny Bell builds “Mountain States” around the character of the five-string banjo, though his focus is far from traditional. There is unease and an underlying gravity to music that is stark, edgy and gnarly in places, with an ominous drone haunting throughout. He set out to make a modern solo banjo album, and he’s done exactly that.

A free jazz saxophonist known for incendiary live shows, Zoh Amba turns to thirteen guitar-based rock songs on “Eyes Full”, their raw, passionate singing to the fore. Sight and being seen thread the album, and a return to Kingsport reckons with the past. It’s an album so complete and so accomplished that it’s hard to believe that it’s their first foray into songwriting.

Eleven songs of top-drawer Americana, “Coin-O-Matic” is pure Deer Tick: unfiltered, honest, at ease in their own skin. Two decades in and self-produced for the first time, they draw on Rhode Island’s half-mythic characters and wear the Springsteen influence honestly with the closing five-song sweep, ultimately confirming the album’s quality — a long-storied band taking aim and hitting all their targets.

Helen Svoboda shares “Veins,” featuring Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen, from her forthcoming album “Headwater” (out June 26th on Room40). The track draws Svoboda’s Finnish background into the vocal work, with Savolainen circling a single phrase about mother and daughter — “This short pondering is injected with raw emotion and melancholic beauty, as if she is bursting out of her younger self.”

On “Long Live Brown Wimpenny,” the eleven-strong Manchester collective are, like The Watersons, both iconoclastic and deeply rooted in tradition. It works precisely because it isn’t a conscious decision: they are simply playing the songs that mean the most to them, in open collaboration and in a vernacular entirely their own — folk music that resounds with originality and freshness.

Bring Your Own Hammer returns with two new singles, giving voice to figures the archive left in the margins. “The Cruel Father,” from Lavinia Blackwall and Neil Farrell with SJ McArdle, draws on an 1860s ballad about a father who abandoned his infant son. “The Girl from Spark’s Lake,” sung by Sophie Coyle, follows a runaway chasing bluebells.

Nora Stanley has spent years as a saxophonist and improviser on records by Cassandra Jenkins, The New Pornographers and Beth Orton. Now she steps out front. Her solo debut “Glass,” out July 31st via Worm Records and co-produced with Nate Mendelsohn, arrives with lead single “Noble Gas”, with Wendy Eisenberg calling her songs ‘subtly devastating.’

Our latest Off the Shelf guest is MorganEve Swain of The Huntress and Holder of Hands. Ahead of “Babylon,” out June 5th, she talks us through ten objects from LadyBird Cottage: a growing collection of hands, a javelina skull, moon phase prints, anvil rings, and a recording box, each carrying a story, and often touching on love and loss.

Memorial, the Brighton duo of Jack Watts and Oliver Spalding, share “Rest (& be thankful)”, their second release for Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community, featuring Irish singer-songwriter Niamh Regan. Named after a Scottish valley and written in half an hour, it holds a steady, driving rhythm while layered harmonies build toward a release carried by Ben Bishop’s guitar and lifted by Regan’s voice.

Darren Hayman reissues “The Violence,” the double album he calls the most ambitious work of his thirty-year career. First released in 2012 and recorded with his sixteen-piece ensemble The Long Parliament, it closes his Essex Trilogy with songs about the 17th-century East Anglian witch trials and the English Civil Wars, now expanded with previously unreleased tracks and demos.

Brighton’s Hollow Hand returns with “Wish Road South,” out September 4th on Loose Music. Lead single “Here Are The Tulips,” a breezy slice of folk-pop built around Max Kinghorn-Mills’ daily bus journey to the studio, arrives with a self-directed video. A UK tour follows this October.

Horse Feathers reissue their long out-of-print debut, “Words Are Dead”, on August 28th via Kill Rock Stars. Recorded in Portland in 2006 by the duo of Justin Ringle and Peter Broderick, the album returns fully remastered, on exclusive vinyl, with a replica of the original six-song demo CD. Hear “Finch on Saturday”, the first thing the band ever committed to tape.

Prison pull up with their third album, “Big Rigs on the BQE”, out July 31st, a long way from last year’s “Downstate”. They’ve shared lead cut “Sunrise Highway” with a scorching single edit video from Johnny Celentano and Cliff Elor — a fast, garage-bred psych charge built live from guitars, bass, drums, fuzz organ and vocals. Two side-long trips, tracked overlooking the highway.

Neon Summer Skin is built around a simple revelation: childhood doesn’t end on schedule, and its afterglow can hit hardest when you think you’ve left it behind. Bedouine returns to the instruments of her early years — piano, trumpet, brass — and wraps memory in bossa nova sway, jazz warmth, and a touch of psychedelia. The result is intimate without being small, and deeply, unguardedly felt.

The final instalment of Folklore Tapes’ Ceremonial County Tapes series is fittingly personal. Mary Stark’s Cumbria side weaves her mother’s home and Conishead Priory’s Buddhist mantras into something intimate and quietly sacred. Monkshood — David Chatton Barker and his eight-year-old son Rowan — then take on Wiltshire’s West Kennett Long Barrow with discordant electric guitar and heavy percussion: ancient ground, thrillingly contemporary sound.