Leeds-based folk singer Chris Brain is our latest ‘Off the Shelf‘ guest, in which we ask artists to present objects from a shelf or elsewhere from their home and talk about them.
Muireann Bradley is a new Celtic soul sister, and with ‘I Kept These Old Blues’, she swings the blues back from the margins. More vitally, she could inspire a fresh generation to investigate the genre.
Harry’s Seagull shows how old songs sung with affection and skill can sparkle like new. Georgia Shackleton’s solo debut is light as a gull’s feather but flush with ideas: it’s one of the freshest and most appealing folk albums of the year.
Taken from Brulée, the second in a triptych of albums from cabane (the collective project conceived by the Belgian musician and photographer thomas jean henri), watch the lyric video for ‘dead song Pt.1’, the beautiful new single featuring Sam Genders.
The alchemy found on ‘hare // hunter // moth // ghost’ is masterful; Kerry Andrew can turn small, rough or difficult things into moments of bright wonder. In You Are Wolf’s hands, transformation is a gift to be celebrated.
It’s often said that lullabies exist in a liminal space, on the ill-defined boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. On this fine album, Abigail Lapell continues to push her own musical boundaries.
Harp, the new musical project of former Midlake singer Tim Smith and his wife Kathi Zung, have shared their new video for “A Fountain”, a song which recalls a heartbreak that Smith suffered and which finds him setting forth on his galleon…
Sung by Eileen Gogan and featuring Neil Farrell, listen to ‘The Female Cabin Boy’, the latest single in the Bring Your Own Hammer series. It’s an outstanding interpretation of a ballad that circulated in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century.
Eclectic and electric in equal measure, Dori Freeman’s ‘Do You Recall’ finds her reaffirming her Appalachian roots and looking beyond them, touching on old traditions and creating her own as her star continues to rise.
We talk to The Furrow Collective (Rachel Newton, Alasdair Roberts, Lucy Farrell and Emily Portman) about their new album, We Know by the Moon – a chilly delight: eleven folk songs blasted by winter winds and steeped in the glow of firelight and moonlight.
‘Thea Gilmore’ is an album shaped by personal upheaval, self-reinvention, uncompromising determination and triumphant, empowered rebirth. Like a beacon, it leads the way out of the darkness.
