Thomas Blake

Macie Stewart’s ‘When the Distance is Blue’ feels even more cerebral than her debut, more improvisational, and more rooted in landscape. But for all the meditativeness and all the improvisation, there is a single-minded artistry at work behind these pieces. 

Delivered with eloquence, fire and an impressive eye for poetic detail, Lonnie Holley’s ‘Tonky’ is a work of multitudes. It follows unlikely trails, expands on themes other artists would pass over, and invites a depth of thought and engagement rarely found in contemporary music.

With lightness and an ear for a concise and cutting phrase, Clara Mann alchemises her experience into a universal emotional reaction on ‘Rift’. In the space of a debut, she has gone from ‘one to watch’ to one of the best songwriters in the country.

On ‘Come Into the Garden’, Natalie Wildgoose conjures a strange world submerged in sweet, subtle sound and rich in the unlearnable language of dream and memory.

Gigspanner Big Band talk about their new album, Turnstone, revealing an insight into an album that exists in a tradition of sprawling and inclusive experimentalism and where variation and difference are celebrated and encouraged.

The songs on Alex Rex’s ‘The National Trust’ may revel in bitterness and humiliation, but they are real and unflinching and fearsomely clever and often beautiful. Neilson remains an absolute one-off.

It’s time Jeffrey Lewis was recognised as one of the best lyricists of his generation, The Even More Freewheelin’ should do more than cement that status. All things being fair, it should go down as one of the best albums of his career.

Oxfordshire and Derbyshire are the latest Ceremonial Counties to get the Folklore Tapes treatment, courtesy of nebulous experimental collective The Funz and audio archaeologist Mark Vernon. Both tracks are awash with unexpected and often eerie beauty.

The Burning Hell’s ‘Ghost Palace’ may sound like an acceptance of Earth’s fate, but there are subtle signs that life…in a way, the diversity that artists like Kom bring to the world is one of the things that make it a future worth fighting for. 

Gigspanner Big Band’s ‘Turnstone’ is a great example of how traditional song can provide a template for exciting new musical discovery. It’s also a career-defining release from one of folk’s most powerfully creative groups.

Teeth of Time is Joshua Burnside’s most rounded, complex and layered work to date. That said, the jagged edges and black depths that have characterised his music for a decade are still there, only now they are illuminated by a fragile beauty.

With Hinterland, Gerry Diver and Lisa Knapp wanted to create something ‘raw and real and unrestrained,’ something that flies in the face of the notion that folk music is a static form…this gloriously free-spirited album is the perfect example of folk’s potential for reinvention.