Manchester/Liverpool/London folk collective Brown Wimpenny announce their debut album Long Live Brown Wimpenny, due 5th June via Broadside Hacks Recordings, alongside new single Old Molly Metcalfe — a cinematic reinvention of Jake Thackray’s bleak tale of a North Yorkshire shepherdess. Enriching Thackray’s a cappella melody with an eerie, enchanting arrangement, the track opens with a live archive performance from the songwriter himself.

Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke, Tommy Peltier’s “Echo Park (The 70’s Sessions)” catches the moment a jazz lifer reinvented himself as a songwriter in 1970s Los Angeles. Recorded in a hillside house near Echo Park Lane, these eleven tracks brim with melodic invention — each could be convincingly sold as a long-forgotten seventies hit. Out now via Drag City.

We’re premiering the video for “King Orfeo,” the debut single from Birdvox — the new project from Sarah Hayes, Inge Thomson, Jenny Sturgeon and Charlotte Printer. An adaptation of a traditional Orpheus myth with a refrain in the now extinct Scandinavian language of Norn, it’s the first taste of their forthcoming album “Shamming The Drama,” due on Hudson Records later this year.

Alongside this week’s Monday Morning Brew Playlist, our Substack Subscribers get to read an advance copy of an upcoming Off the Shelf feature from Natalie Wildgoose, whose new EP, Rural Hours, is due April 15th via state51. The Brew includes new tunes from Juni Habel, Magic Tuber Stringband, The Deslondes, Lemoncello, Dead Goat, Andrew Wasylyk, Mike Tod, Kris Drever, Emily Portman, Alela Diane, Sluice, tofusmell, Joshua Burnside and more.

The latest KLOF Mixtape moves from Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou’s dreamlike soundscapes anchored in sea, sky and stone to the airy, pastoral improvisations of Prymek & Sage. Alongside new offerings from Sam Grassie, Magic Tuber Stringband, Juni Habel, Pan•American, Buck Meek and more, ancient folk recordings from Tibet and Greece complete a collection for unhurried listening.

Shelter, the new album from Chaz Prymek (aka Lake Mary) and Matthew Sage, is a rather beautiful, unhurried recording built from live improvisations in a pole barn studio, delicately adorned with sparse overdubs. The music is intricate and spacious, very elegantly performed and balanced — the sound of musicians who love expression through sound and the environment they call home.

Durham, NC quartet Sluice release Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut, on March 27th. Recorded at Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s and tended over two years, the album finds frontman Justin Morris reckoning with disillusionment, a violent robbery, and the long road back to music — framing companionship, in love and in community, as worth the struggle.

Joshua Abrams’ Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation is a single, thirty-five-minute swathe of all-enveloping, slow-moving minimalism. Originally a score for Lisa Alvarado’s multidisciplinary installation at REDCAT, CalArts, the album tracks a semi-fluid path, advancing like cooling lava — a matrix of abundant and not always predictable intersections, there to be explored, to inspire fierce thought, but also to luxuriate in or meditate on.

Juni Habel releases ‘Pearl Cloud Song,’ a lush instrumental from her forthcoming album “Evergreen In Your Mind,” out 10th April on Basin Rock. Born from an open tuning discovery, the track layers steel-string guitar with Herman Wildhagen’s pedal steel and distant vocal traces — a beautiful, unhurried piece from one of folk’s most compelling new voices.

Sam Grassie’s debut album, “Where Two Hawks Fly”, arrives after years of adversity — life-threatening injury, debilitating illness and personal tragedy — and sounds all the more remarkable for it. His guitar playing is deft and unshowy, worthy of hero Bert Jansch, while collaborators help shape something deeply assured, generous and communal.

Magic Tuber Stringband share “Where the Place Becomes Forgetting,” a gorgeous single from their upcoming album “Heavy Water”. Featuring field recordings from a pond on the edge of a nuclear site in Northern Georgia, the track layers steady banjo and guitar riffing with fraught fiddle swoops — watch the intimate live performance video now.

The Huntress and Holder of Hands have announced ‘Babylon’, their second album, due June 5th. A decade on from their debut ‘Avalon’, MorganEve Swain’s project — born from the loss of her husband and musical partner, Dave Lamb (Brown Bird) — returns heavier and fuller, grappling with corruption, redemption and hope. Dark-hued new single Promethean is out now.