Danny Neill

Samuel Blaney created “Island Rains” in moonlit reverie on the west coast of Ireland, with Adem Ilhan and Neil MacColl colouring the songs without ever overwhelming them. You can hear the influence of a life pared back to essentials, and a tangible sense of how tending something small becomes a way of steadying yourself against the wider world.

Sailing Stones’ “Slow Magic” is one of the most satisfyingly complete collections of songs I have heard this year. Built around matrescence, the transitions a woman goes through at the time of bringing new life into the world, the whole record plays like a kaleidoscopic whirligig, shimmering in and out of focus, crafted with a crackly analogue, hands-on human touch. Her best album yet.

On “Pt. Roadknight”, Leah Senior leans into the hazy fog of late-sixties, early-seventies folk rock, recorded with a natural analogue texture that lends these songs a human touch. It turns its inward gaze outward, offering her reflections with a clarity of purpose. As she reminds us in ‘Talk To Me,’ there is a fine line between focus and withdrawal, and this album walks it with rare grace.

Recorded live at Bear Creek Studios with no click tracks and minimal overdubs, “The Landfill” finds Fruit Bats in full flight and a songwriter discovering how immediacy translates when the whole room is burning bright. It underlines the prominent place held by Fruit Bats in the canon of modern, rootsy American songwriting.

Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders’ “Liquid Donnon” is a record that gives every track the space and time it needs to reach its destination. It draws together dusty folk, cosmic jazz, deep psych, and free improvisation. For those who follow Alexander, the concert tapers included, this is essential.

MorganEve Swain’s “Babylon”, the second album from The Huntress and Holder of Hands, is a vivid, heavily weighted folk-rock album that traces how grief changes shape over time. Over a decade on from losing her husband Dave Lamb, Swain channels that long private reckoning into something communal and forward-looking — moving and epic, with a rough-hewn buoyancy that ultimately nudges toward light.

On “These Are The Days That Turn Into Years”, their seventh studio album, Pharis & Jason Romero, following their 2022 release, channel four years of living, touring, parenting and banjo-building into their most open-hearted set yet. Tracked in their riverside Horsefly barn, it feels lived-in and luminous — a pure rootsy joyride that will send you straight back to the opening track.

Eleven songs of top-drawer Americana, “Coin-O-Matic” is pure Deer Tick: unfiltered, honest, at ease in their own skin. Two decades in and self-produced for the first time, they draw on Rhode Island’s half-mythic characters and wear the Springsteen influence honestly with the closing five-song sweep, ultimately confirming the album’s quality — a long-storied band taking aim and hitting all their targets.

Neon Summer Skin is built around a simple revelation: childhood doesn’t end on schedule, and its afterglow can hit hardest when you think you’ve left it behind. Bedouine returns to the instruments of her early years — piano, trumpet, brass — and wraps memory in bossa nova sway, jazz warmth, and a touch of psychedelia. The result is intimate without being small, and deeply, unguardedly felt.

On first listen, REXEN sounds like an introspective singer-songwriter. He isn’t. “The Chauffeur,” his first full studio album, recorded at Real World Studios with John Parish on the mix, swings from intoxicated baritone croon to high register, bending faintly sinister Americana into one new shape after another. The result is an album designed for deep engagement, one that rewards close listening and lingers long after it ends.

GALVEZTON is the one-man vehicle of songwriter Robert Kuhn, and on “Ocean Cabaret” he folds surf-streaked psych, folk and Gulf Coast dust into something all his own. These were the late-night kitchen songs his wife overheard and pushed him to release — recordings kept intentionally bare, foregrounding voice, guitar and the emotional grain of his writing. Music for healing.

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.