Thomas Blake

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.

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.