Thomas Blake

In many ways, Dean McPhee’s latest offering is a cerebral trip for sure, but every minute of Astral Gold is brimming with what can only be described as soul.

Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine’s Outliers revels in the beauty of the remote. While conceived and recorded entirely online, it feels astonishingly close. The attention to detail and clarity of sound are incredible, and their contributions are clearly defined yet entirely in accord.

Junkboy’s ‘Littoral States’ is an engulfing and satisfying half-hour – melodic, intelligent, haunting music that slips in and out of genres but always stays true to the overarching theme of places and how human emotions interact with them.

With Collage, Erlend Apneseth Trio move further into experimental territory. Joined by singer Maja Ratkje, Collage is a masterful, almost mesmeric achievement. Their never dull attitude to recording seems to recognise music as a kind of palpable measure of deep time.

Thomas Blake shares his Top 10 Albums of 2023. As he states in his introduction, it was no easy task to whittle down from hundreds to just ten, but here they are…including Bex Burch, John Francis Flynn, ØXN, Maxine Funke, Brìghde Chaimbeul and more.

ØXN’s unwillingness to conform in any way to stereotypes makes them one of the most vital acts in any music scene today. CYRM is an uncompromising debut album, like a monolith looming through fog.

The variety and depth of ‘Move into the Luminous’ is breathtaking; Makushin have fashioned an engrossing collection of ten perfect miniatures…ambient epics packaged as pop songs, delicate folk latticeworks enmeshed with impassioned jazz. It’s a stunning achievement.

Harry’s Seagull shows how old songs sung with affection and skill can sparkle like new. Georgia Shackleton’s solo debut is light as a gull’s feather but flush with ideas: it’s one of the freshest and most appealing folk albums of the year.

The alchemy found on ‘hare // hunter // moth // ghost’ is masterful; Kerry Andrew can turn small, rough or difficult things into moments of bright wonder. In You Are Wolf’s hands, transformation is a gift to be celebrated.

We talk to The Furrow Collective (Rachel Newton, Alasdair Roberts, Lucy Farrell and Emily Portman) about their new album, We Know by the Moon – a chilly delight: eleven folk songs blasted by winter winds and steeped in the glow of firelight and moonlight.

Joseph Allred’s New Jerusalem shifts between the cosmic and the cosmopolitan and results in a multilayered album that is often intriguingly dense but never far away from a state of euphoria.

On ‘Look Over the Wall, See the Sky’, John Francis Flynn unropes songs from their historical moorings and lets them barrel downstream…Refreshing and vividly utopian, these songs exist in liberated states that have the feel of radical statements.