Danny Neill

With photography by Sophie Reichert, Danny Neill reports back from End of the Road, a brilliantly curated festival that still gets it right. Some of the shining highlights from a fully packed four days include Bug Club, Emma-Jean Thackray, Lisa O’Neill, Broadside Hacks & Mike Heron, Katy J Pearson, Jerron Paxton, Sharon Van Etten, Rosali, Scott Lavene, Muireann Bradley, Yoshika Cowell, Throwing Muses, Stewart Lee, Father John Misty and more.

Chicago Underground Duo’s Hyperglyph is a stunning return, a masterful fusion of free jazz and otherworldly exploration. Rob Mazurek’s trumpet and synthesizers blend with Chad Taylor’s percussion, creating a relentless, vibrant album that feels both familiar and entirely new. It’s an exhilarating, multi-layered work of pure invention.

Chris Staples’ ‘Don’t Worry’ is a beautiful portrait of stillness, born from a welcome life gear change. Leaning further into his introspective Americana style, the record is warm and minimalist. Intimate songs with soothing pedal steel and subtle piano explore triumphs and regrets with personal, poetic lyrics, offering an uplifting rumination on the maturity gained with age and the sense of it all.

Emerging from dislocation and a traumatic break-up, Yoshika Colwell’s “On The Wing” is a raw, disturbed song cycle. This profoundly heartfelt and honest album explores challenging feelings with unflinching intensity. The elegant, baroque folk-pop, with echoes of Nick Drake, analyses a turbulent life chapter, allowing cracks of hopeful light to break through its elegant melancholy in a work that feels honest and real.

It feels like Mike Polizze has unlocked some doors with ‘Around Sound’. There is a tone that unites the whole record: a celestial, dreamy mirage of sound that shifts with the elements from bright sunshine heat to breezy clouds casting darker shadows. Where he travels next may be as hard to predict as ever, but if the results are as fine as this, then we must follow him.

Faun Fables’ Counterclockwise is a strange, beguiling musical world. Overall, the record is an exploration of time, not simply thematically, for it also shifts perspectives, delighting in the head-spinning effect these shifting sands can have on your senses. It is a deep and eccentric work, but ultimately a deeply satisfying experience, with so many recognisable elements that you cannot help but sense a welcome familiarity too.

Danny Neill catches the final night of the “Josienne Clarke Sings Sandy Denny” 2025 Tour at Cambridge Junction. “By the time of the evening’s yearning closer, ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes,’ I am already resolving to return whenever this songbird flies across the evening sky once again.”

Lavinia Blackwall’s ‘The Making’ is a masterwork of the acid-folk form, full of confidence and devoid of weak spots. From the title track’s seductive melange of medieval breakdowns to the Midlake classic-sounding backdoor reverie of ‘We All Get Lost’, featuring some marvellous descending vocal phrases that bring Annie Haslam of Renaissance to mind, the highlights are plentiful throughout this exquisite new album from the former Trembling Bells multi-instrumentalist and vocalist.

Marc Ribot is less known as a vocalist, writer and solo performer, but Map of a Blue City, an album thirty years in the making, changes everything. For a man whose signature is sonic profundity, not surprisingly, every track has more going on in those grooves than can be absorbed in one listen, making it fit for repeated listens. It will definitely stand as his must-hear solo showcase.

Josienne Clarke is currently touring “Across The Evening Sky: The Songs Of Sandy Denny”. Danny Neill catches up with Josienne to chat about Sandy Denny and Josienne’s own solo journey.

With Altogether Stranger, Lael Neale has cooked up a concoction of her own that will be ripe for inspiration to many: an exquisitely crafted masterclass in retro minimalism and free expression.

Fred Moten & Brandon Lopez’s ‘Revision’ offers a unique hybrid of voice and double bass, intertwined impossibly as one in a recital that lives, breathes, evolves, explores, changes and expresses as one in an impossibly unrepetitive hour of sonic splendour.