Thomas Blake

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.

The Furrow Collective are simply one of the most formidable combinations of musicians in today’s folk music scene, and in “We Know by the Moon”, they have created one of the year’s outstanding albums.

Alice Gerrard’s Sun To Sun acts both as a tonic and a kick in the pants: it reminds us of the enduring place of protest in folk music but also of the importance of humour and heart in life as well as in art.

“There is Only Love and Fear” is a wholly distinctive musical language, a jazz-inflected improvisational world music that quotes from minimalism without ever being in thrall to its history. When you consider that this is Bex Burch’s solo debut, that’s quite some feat.

We chat to Sheffield’s Melrose Quartet about their new album ‘Make the World Anew’ – a staunch defence of the sheer joy of creativity, allowing for contemporary political songwriting and age-old dance tunes, poignant a cappella standards and complex instrumentals.

TRÚ point out that Eternity Near aims to look past endings to what lies beyond. It leaves room for both hope and mystery and is an admirably mature move for a band still near the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a distinguished career.

Make The World Anew attempts in a small but determined way to achieve the edict set out in its title, and it succeeds resoundingly. It is the Melrose Quartet’s most upbeat and accomplished album to date.

Adele H’s voice is dripping with passion and personality, and the transition to piano-based songs on Impermanence has allowed that voice to flourish. It is a wonderful work of art, brimming with confidence and bursting with important questions about womanhood, metaphysics and music.

On Dreamer Awake, Rachel Sermanni delivers surprising, touching and hopeful moments alongside darkly delicate, atmospheric folk songs and spellbinding experimentalism. Ultimately, it is the sound of a spectacularly gifted songwriter growing personally and artistically in the face of pain and difficulty.

Although there have only been six P.G. Six albums over a twenty-two-year period, they provide a definitive snapshot of the psych-folk genre. His latest, Murmurs & Whispers, is a nuanced, enthralling work that suggests this brilliant songwriter is hitting another career peak.