Thomas Blake

There is no other songwriter working at quite the imaginative level that Dawson is consistently reaching these days, and in Circle, he has found a band whose richness, variety and adaptability is the perfect complement to his unique vision. Henki is a strong late contender for album of the year.

As songwriters go, nobody puts quite as much on the table as Neilson. In a live setting such raw experiences are both valuable and, in this case, hugely rewarding. Memory, Speak is a moment in time, a document of Alex Rex at their most formidable and fragile.

The debut winter-themed EP by Milkweed is something of an outlier…They seem intent on reviving the more outlandish, eccentric traditions of folk music, where old and new religions intermingle and where strange, bewitching sounds proliferate. This can only be a good thing.

Based around the one constant figure of Stephen Cracknell, The Memory Band’s sixth album Colours, again features a number of special guests. Existing on the margins of folk and electronica, they manage to bring a touch of the sublime to these liminal states.

Elliott is living proof that a well-timed whisper can often be more consequential than a shout, and on December songs he takes that aesthetic to its quietly impressive limit. It is hard to see how this album could have come out any better.

Devin Hoff pays tribute to Anne Briggs through a series of dramatic but somehow faithful rearrangements. Featuring a stellar cast of like-minded Briggs fans, Voices From the Empty Moor looks backwards for inspiration but is entirely contemporary in feel.

Throughout Sleeping Spirals, the debut album from Hannah James and Toby Kuhn, distinct threads of travel, place and self-discovery come together to form a complex but unified whole. It is a journey you will want to take again and again.

Henry Parker’s Lammas Fair is an album full of old wisdom and new beginnings, deeply rooted in the wild landscape of northern England, but ultimately outward-looking and welcoming.

Fohr’s work as Circuit Des Yeux is consistently challenging, boldly experimental and always liberating. -io is probably her strongest work to date, a powerful statement born out of genuine feeling.

On Tonebeds For Poetry, Stick in the Wheel cast their net wider delivering sounds you might not expect to find on a folk album. They remain one of the most ground-breaking and unpredictable acts in any of the countless genres they move between.

On Genius Loci 1: White Peak, The Ciderhouse Rebellion have taken a step further into the unknown, with an album that marries their flawless musicianship with an ever more experimental outlook. The whole album hangs together like a story and is totally captivating.

dreamcreatures draws its power from enigmatic sources: there is a tension between Webb’s self-confessed lack of confidence and his evident and supreme gifts as a songwriter and singer. It all makes for a raw, quietly uncompromising and thoroughly engrossing listen.