On “The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music”, Marisa Anderson reinterprets music from places the United States has been in conflict with since 1970, drawn from Harry Smith’s private collection of nearly a thousand records. It feels like a very open-armed project and a gesture of connecting that could hardly be better timed — beautifully studied and played, and a resounding success.

North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband return with “Heavy Water”, their first album as a full-time trio. Inspired by Courtney Werner’s work as an ecologist on a nuclear-contaminated stretch of the Savannah River, it combines intuitive appreciation for the landscape with intellectual and conceptual rigour — an album so engaged with history and place it’s hard to say where those things end and the music begins.

Tara Clerkin Trio have shared “Lazy Daisy”, the latest track from their forthcoming album “Somewhere Good”, out 5th June via World of Echo. Following a 6 Music session, it’s the Bristol trio’s first album since 2023’s “On The Turning Ground” — forty-odd minutes of harmonium, upright bass and hushed vocals, sounding more like themselves than ever.

Lady Maisery and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith return with “Wakefire: A Summer Album”, a full-scale double album that trumps its predecessor in both ambition and reward. Presented as a largely chronological account of summer, twenty-seven tracks might sound like something of a throwback in today’s climate of instant gratification, but they make it seem like a revolutionary act, and a hugely gratifying one at that.

BCMC — Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — return with “Tête-à-Tête”, the second single from their forthcoming Drag City album “Stash”, out June 26th. Where lead single “Kaleidosmoke” unfurled in patient, accumulative psychedelia, this one rotates skyward — Crain’s organ tearing through prog, gospel, psych and funk, MacKay’s twin guitars tracing intricate, Krautrock-leaning patterns. A new visualiser arrives alongside the single.

On their self-titled debut, The MerKaBa Brotherhood — duo Roman Norfleet and Andre Raiah — treat rhythm as a vessel for hidden knowledge, shaping sound the way mystics shape symbols. Drawing on esoteric texts, sacred imagery and improvisation, this coded manuscript turns noise into philosophy, vibration into shared language, parachuting us into the place where all the in-between notes live.

On his eighth album, his first since 2023’s ‘More Photographs,’ Kevin Morby returns from somewhere far. “Little Wide Open” is a road record across 13 tracks: tangled highways, small towns, roadside crosses, and rock-and-roll romance. From the engine-rumble of opener ‘Badlands’ to the open-armed homecoming of closer ‘Field Guide For The Butterflies,’ Morby writes with weary-eyed honesty.

On “Counting Sunsets”, out now on Northern Spy Records, the New York trio SUSS further distil their sound across ten songs, allowing plenty of space between the instrumentation. An intricate fusion of Americana ingredients and electronic soundscapes, this is their finest, most fully realised expression of “ambient country” yet — a lesson in minimalism from a band with delicate, discerning touches.

The Bevis Frond unveil the music video for “Romany Blue”, taken from their recent 27th album “Horrorful Heights” on Fire Records. Directed by Italian filmmaker and long-time fan Roberto Beani in Bologna using a vintage Academy 1.37 aspect ratio and handheld camera, the clip arrives ahead of a UK tour beginning in Coventry on June 4th.

For all its preoccupation with what slips away — faces misremembered, friends taken too early, the houses we once lived in — “Who’s Keeping Time?” is markedly less solitary than anything Alela Diane has made since “To Be Still”. Michael Hurley’s death sent her back into the room with other musicians. The album doesn’t argue against loss; it gathers people around it.

Biita Houdei — the new moniker of singer-songwriter Lisa Houdei (formerly LéPonds) — shares debut single “Life Inside The Hourglass” via Basin Rock and Father/Daughter. Shaped in the shadows and sounds of Topanga Canyon, the sub-three-minute strum dropped into her mind “from a ghost of sorts” and was written in twenty minutes. Produced by Haley Heynderickx in her first lead production role.

Pharis & Jason Romero return on June 12th with “These Are The Days That Turn In To Years”, their seventh studio album for Free Dirt Records. Recorded at the duo’s restored riverside barn in Horsefly, BC, it is, in press notes, “a songwriter’s deep exhale, replete with stories, love, and nostalgia.” Title track “These Are The Days” is out now.