Thomas Blake

Jurado is the perfect songwriter for these strange times. He is wistful without ever wallowing in nostalgia, and he balances heartbreak with hope in a way that few artists can. This represents some of his finest work to date.

Thomas Blake interviews the Gigspanner Big Band, our Artists of the Month, who demonstrate they are admirably democratic not just in their music-making process, but also in their interviews where everyone gets their say.

Good Times Older is a winner on many fronts but it also gives us some idea of just how gifted Jack Sharp is as a singer and interpreter of song. We can only hope that his foray into the world of traditional music continues.

iyatraQuartet’s music is a timely reminder of that all-important link between people and their art, and Break The Dawn exists as a complex, stunningly-performed artefact that offers a little hope in dark times.

Natural Invention is a piece of music that feels thrillingly, frighteningly, beautifully of our time. With the Gigspanner Big Band, Peter Knight has assembled a group of musicians intent on making some of the most important and exhilarating art ever to sit under the banner of folk music.

This is an album that owes everything to the interconnectedness of things and is well aware of that fact… It is elemental and challenging music, but such is the skill of Apneseth and his band it feels beautifully simple.

Huam has something of the magic of an untrodden path about it. It rewards deep listening…light and quick, profound and full of care, it is an album of serenely balanced opposites. Also watch their new video for Mountain Of Gold.

Downhill Uplift is the sort of album that will sound different every time you listen to it, and while it takes inspiration from a cluster of well-worn genres, the way those genres are meshed together seems entirely novel. The work of an extremely proficient musician and his band.

With Companion Rises, Chasny has done something even more intriguing than usual: by pushing the experimental envelope further than before he has somehow emerged with a collection of songs that are amongst the most immediately rewarding of his twenty-plus year career.

Like the sound of the wind in the reeds from which Yeats took inspiration, Abbé’s music is full of shifting natural beauty, whispers and sighs that could be sounds of sorrow or of love. Numberless Dreams is masterful in its delivery and intriguing in its opacity.

Like Lisa O’Neill, Ye Vagabonds and Lankum, Varo share a deep understanding of traditional music, preserving the genre’s heritage with the need to create a form of music that is fresh and new. This accomplished debut should position them at the forefront of the scene.

Andromeda, like its predecessor, is a difficult, brilliant, rewarding snapshot of human turmoil…the stature of this formidable album will continue to grow even as the scars it describes begin to heal.