Mike Davies

Words We Mean is the second full-length album from Oklahoma trio Annie Oakley that charts a personal journey from youth to womanhood. The original Annie Oakley never missed her target. This is a bullseye too. 

Portland singer-songwriter Hip Hatchet makes his debut under his own name. His voice is dusty, world-weary and intimate, a melancholic caress, his guitar work simple and uncluttered. The work of a travelling troubadour reflecting on the miles covered…

Evening Machines is Gregory Alan Isakov’s first album of new material in five years. Listening to the album has been described as being enfolded in a comfortable solitude; settle down and enjoy the glow and the hum.

Healy’s second album steps up a level from her 2014 debut. One of the finest Americana albums out of the UK this year, Healy doesn’t just keep the flame alight, she ensures it blazes.

Four years on from her Chasing Ghosts debut, the Alabama-born multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Sylvia Rose Novak returns with a self-produced album that welds the personal and the political.

It’s often the case that emergent young folk singers start out mining traditional folk roots before sewing their own crop, in reversing the cycle and visiting them directly here…she proves herself very much in command of rather than in thrall to them.

Iowa-born Nathan Bell follows up last years’ Love>Fear (48 Hours in Traitorland) with what he refers to as the unexpected fourth in his Family Man trilogy. A writer of songs both deeply personal and universal, long may he continue to toll.

Magic Ship finds Amelia Meath, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Molly Sarlé reuniting as Mountain Man. Beguilingly simple, at times childlike at others worldly-wise, Magic Ship is a bewitching album; you should book your passage forthwith.

Tablelands is the third and final EP in India Electric Co.’s trilogy of songs contrasting the city and the country and our search for greener pastures in its themes of displacement and unification. An outstanding trilogy that serves to emphasise the duo’s status on the folk landscape.

The mark of a successful cover is to take the original and, rather than treat it over reverentially, ruffle up its hair, give it a new wardrobe and make it your own. William Elliott Whitmore has full possession here.

Variously embracing blues, gospel and Americana,  This Too Shall Light, is the second solo album from Amy Helm, daughter of Levon Helm. Produced by Joe Henry, it comprises of a great a mix of originals and covers.

Having released their Tucker Martine-produced fourth album Ruins, at the start of the year, Swedish songbird and songwriter sisters First Aid Kit return with this unexpected and wholly delightful EP Tender Offerings.