Thomas Blake

An album full of human warmth, but also tinged with wildness. This is the sign of a master musician at work, and Hay certainly fits that description. It is only two years since his debut and he is already one of the finest guitarists of his generation.

Rose in June is an endlessly varied and accomplished album that sees the Remnant Kings at the top of their game and shows just why Jon Boden is one of the most lauded folk musicians this century.

Catherine Rudie’s ability to create vivid moods from often sparse ingredients is a rare gift – she can make you feel as if you inhabit the dream-spaces of these songs, and then return you to the real world with a bump.

They can be cosmopolitan in one breath, ethereal in the next. Their songs can be sad and yearning or darkly humorous. Their arrangements can sound, almost at once, ancient and startlingly contemporary. The rapid evolution of Bird In The Belly into one of our finest folk acts is a joy to behold.

We chat to Luke Daniels, our current Artist of the Month, about his new album “Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies”. Daniels is one of folk music’s true originals. Whatever he plans to do next is unlikely to be quite like anything else.

Richard Dawson’s ‘2020’ is a sincere appeal to optimism, and above all else, sincerity is Dawson’s calling card. This is art shorn of artifice, pop against populism, and it just so happens to be one of the defining statements of our times.

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Thomas Bartlett have created an album that is seductively dreamlike but sometimes sad, layered like a palimpsest but accessible on every one of those layers. It is unlikely you will hear a better instrumental album this year.

Luke Daniels’ “Old Friends & Exhausted Enemies” is full of mystery and emotion. It is the work of a discerning reader, a remarkable songwriter, and a musician with the touch of an alchemist.

Hannah James has created an album that explores life from countless angles. It is sad, fun, wise, angry and thought-provoking in equal measure and it has a real flair for the dramatic. She has established herself as a highly individual and almost unparalleled songwriter.

Few artists can so effectively use the strangeness of the old to pin down the strangeness of the new. The Fiery Margin achieves this with the vigour and surefootedness of an artist fully engaged with the world and yet never fully at peace with it.

On Green Ribbons, each singer brings something unique and subtly experimental to the table, and the result is a collection of songs that transcends genre and fuses the history of vocal music with the most exciting aspects of its present.

The Lines We Draw Together is a piece of work that sounds both fresh and full of experience, an album for our times, but steeped in history, its poetry is not short on intellectual rigour, but its message is one of earthy wisdom and simplicity – an important album, an album that is full of life.