Mike Davies

It’s been a good year for debut male/female duo albums, the latest coming from Kyle McGonegle and Liat Lis, better known as The Gossamer Strings. Due to the Darkness is a substantial and rewarding album.

Available as a limited edition EP, Music/Nature extends the themes of finding hope and meaning amidst an atmosphere of division, and the many forms of fragmentation explored on Atomise.

Glasgow duo Iona MacDonald and Paul Tasker, mark their fifteenth anniversary as Doghouse Roses next year, but the celebrations start early with this, their fourth album which ‘shines like a beacon’.

Dig into the lyrics of ‘Bonfire and Pine’, the new album from Hope in High Water, and you are instantly hit by the weight of human emotion conveyed in the lyrics from childhood trauma to Grenfell, it’s an album of healing and truth.

Rustic, pastoral and suffused with a sense of tranquillity and of being one with the landscape, Endersby has crafted a quietly enrapturing album about navigating your way through life’s labyrinths with the healing power of nature as your guide.

For their fourth album, Canadian trio West My Friend enlist a full symphony orchestra and choir to augment their melodic brand of guitar, mandolin and accordion flavoured folk.

Their first new material since 2017’s debut album, Go Get Gone, this five-track EP finds The Worry Dolls in fine form. Hopefully, a new full album will be surfacing some time next year, on the evidence here it should be hefty stuff.

A departure from the secular and partly self-penned material on their debut, but remaining firmly rooted in their love of traditional Kentuckian bluegrass, there is an irresistible and infectious joy in what they do, so amen to that.

Journals, the latest album from Luke Jackson, demonstrates once again why he is one of the most distinctive voices, both literally and figuratively, on the contemporary folk scene. It’s time this was more widely recognised.

Just four months after releasing the studio version of Western Stars, now comes the soundtrack to the cinematic film version recorded live in Bruces own nearly 100-year-old barn.

Hannah Rose Platt follows up her well-received debut, Portraits, with a second set of variously musically lively and more reflective Americana-veined songs, featuring vocals from Sid Griffin and Danny George Wilson.

Eight albums in and it’s clear that Annie & Rodd Capps, while not looking to shake up the formula or push any envelopes, are holding their own on ‘When They Fall’.