On “Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople”, the music and poetry exist symbiotically, growing out of the same physical and political landscape. Williams has a gift of kindling revolutionary thought through a sense of responsibility, to the land and to each other. It’s a message the world needs to hear, and on this beautiful, angry and groundbreaking live album, he gets that message across with unrivalled eloquence.

Taking its name from a street in Birmingham that a teenage Jon Wilks would busk, Needless Alley is described as a patchwork of memories and marks a more autobiographical approach to his writing after previous trad folk-inclined material. These songs from his mental attic are definitely worth exploring, and, as a guitarist, he fully deserves his place alongside names such as Jansch, Carthy, and Simpson.

Good Times is the latest offering from Alexei Shishkin. “…pop culture, poetics, psychology and philosophy are rolled into a surreal, lumpy ball and garnished with a palatable – and memorable – indie-pop melody.” Despite Shishkin’s lo-fi beginnings and his continuing willingness to drink from the well of slacker aesthetics, Good Times is a bold and – dare we say it – polished artistic statement.

Recently shortlisted for this year’s Welsh Music Prize, watch a short film on the making of The Gentle Good’s latest album, Elan, and the landscape and people that inspired it. How he lets the past and present speak through his music is genuinely remarkable. Don’t miss his upcoming Autumn Tour.

This week’s Monday Morning Brew Playlist features Yo La Tengo, White Magic, Jeanne-Marie Sens, Xylouris White, Les Filles de Illighadad, Gossimer, Keto, Mary Ocher & Julia Kent, The Owl Service, Sarah Louise, Josephine Foster, Grand Veymont, Buck Curran, Monde UFO, Young Marble Giants, Ed Askew, Maxine Funke, Mess Esque, Dave Deporis, Myriam Gendron, and Peixe e Limão.

Our latest Off the Shelf guests are Dublin duo Varo, featuring Consuelo Nerea Breschi and Lucie Azconaga. In this series, we ask artists to present objects from a shelf or shelves in their homes and discuss them, a form of storytelling through objects. Varo recently released their highly anticipated new album, The World That I Knew, featuring some of the biggest names in Ireland’s contemporary folk and trad scene.

To mark the release of Junior Brother’s highly anticipated new album “The End”, a further video from Ellius Grace has been shared for the stripped-back “Old Bell,” a “rickety lo-fi folk song that grapples with impending death. Junior Brother says: “‘Old Bell’ is a song that pushes back against the forces which pull the fit and young into a pit of no return”.

Guitarist Steve Gunn has announced his new album, Daylight Daylight, his first for the No Quarter label. It features contributions from Macie Stewart, Ben Whiteley, Nick Macri, and Hunter Diamond, and was produced and arranged by his old friend, James Elkington. Listen to the lead single “Nearly There” and don’t miss his upcoming tour dates in the UK and EU.

“I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina” celebrates one of the most enduring and impactful songwriters of the last thirty years with twelve loving covers. Artists like MJ Lenderman, Horse Jumper of Love, and Hand Habits explore the raw, unvarnished truth of Molina’s music, reflecting on an artist who never shied away from desperation and who found a strange beauty in the struggle of modern life.

With this year’s Supersonic Sunday-lineup featuring some of KLOF’s favourites, we went along for the ride. Bridget Hayden, Jackie-O Motherf-cker, Hedgling, Six Organs of Admittance, Cinder Well, Jennifer Reid, Poor Creature, Richard Dawson, Funeral Folk and The Bug & Warrior Queen were outstanding. On the strength of these performances, Supersonic can claim to be not just the best small festival in the country, but the best of any size.

Buck Curran takes us Track by Track through his new album Far Driven Sun, which finds him returning to his musical roots: a deep love for the ambient and resonant nature of the acoustic steel-string guitar in alternate tunings. The album was inspired by a unique ‘Butterfly’ Model 1 guitar made by Stefan Sobell in 1990, which was used to record Arborea’s first album, Wayfaring Summer.

Gwenifer Raymond’s third album, Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark, fuses folk horror with the cosmic. From the complex guitar prowess of “Jack Parsons Blues” to the eerie sounds of “Banjo Players of Aleph One,” Raymond’s new work is a natural progression of her sound that raises the instrumental acoustic guitar album to new heights and delivers something new. It’s another banger from this excellent guitarist.