Thomas Blake

Toby Hay and Aidan Thorne’s ‘after a pause’ is music of sharply-defined brilliance, shot through with the light of the Welsh countryside, and brimming with consideration both for the spirit of collaboration and for the natural world.

Lately, the influence of traditional music, always there somewhere in the background, has made itself more apparent in the music of BIG|BRAVE, and A Chaos Of Flowers continues this trend – a visceral, moving, complex and gloriously heavy piece of work.

Oren Ambarchi is once again joined by the rhythm section of Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin for Ghosted II: an enriching, multi-layered and almost indecently accomplished album.    

Kiran Leonard’s ‘Real Home’ is spiky, literate and humane, and although it navigates some extraordinarily varied terrain, it never strays too far from its theme or from its ultimately melodic musical core. Real Home is an object lesson in combining experimental substance with accessible style.

On Hardly Working, The Burning Hell’s Ariel Sharratt and Matthias Kom team up with Shotgun Jimmie on a multifaceted and highly satisfying piece of work. They are on tour now in the UK.

Olivia Chaney’s ‘Circus of Desire’ is an album of great maturity, crystalline beauty and sometimes painful self-knowledge, one that marks her out as one of our finest singers and one of our most valuable and accomplished songwriters.   

Daisy Rickman’s Howl is a wonder, an ancient pastoral dream of an album full of contemporary resonances existing at a kind of crossroads where the early freak-folk pioneers collide with a more recent strain of rural hauntology. The result sounds like a whole new genre.

Dana Gavanski’s Late Slap is unlike anything else in her back catalogue. It appeals directly to the senses, every moment an invitation to immersion. A detailed and accomplished work, its fleshy and often complex sound never gets in the way of its inherently airy melodicism.

Needlefall, the new album from North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband, is perhaps their most accomplished and cohesive record to date. An intense musical experience that’s also exceptionally rewarding.

SAICOBAB are a four-headed beast birthed from the fertile soup of Japan’s underground music scene. There is a winning immediacy to everything the band does on NRTYA, making a glorious spectacle of the unexpected while leading you down a melodic garden path of twists and turns.

The unbridled creativity on show throughout Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado looks set to be Ana Lua Caiano’s calling card. It’s a remarkably assured and highly individual debut.

Milkweed’s ‘Folklore 1979’ is one of the most invigorating and interesting releases of recent years. While the duo would no doubt balk at the term masterpiece, as long as Folklore 1979 exists in the world, it will have to contend with such labels.