Albums

GALVEZTON is the one-man vehicle of songwriter Robert Kuhn, and on “Ocean Cabaret” he folds surf-streaked psych, folk and Gulf Coast dust into something all his own. These were the late-night kitchen songs his wife overheard and pushed him to release — recordings kept intentionally bare, foregrounding voice, guitar and the emotional grain of his writing. Music for healing.

On “The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music”, Marisa Anderson reinterprets music from places the United States has been in conflict with since 1970, drawn from Harry Smith’s private collection of nearly a thousand records. It feels like a very open-armed project and a gesture of connecting that could hardly be better timed — beautifully studied and played, and a resounding success.

North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband return with “Heavy Water”, their first album as a full-time trio. Inspired by Courtney Werner’s work as an ecologist on a nuclear-contaminated stretch of the Savannah River, it combines intuitive appreciation for the landscape with intellectual and conceptual rigour — an album so engaged with history and place it’s hard to say where those things end and the music begins.

Lady Maisery and Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith return with “Wakefire: A Summer Album”, a full-scale double album that trumps its predecessor in both ambition and reward. Presented as a largely chronological account of summer, twenty-seven tracks might sound like something of a throwback in today’s climate of instant gratification, but they make it seem like a revolutionary act, and a hugely gratifying one at that.

On their self-titled debut, The MerKaBa Brotherhood — duo Roman Norfleet and Andre Raiah — treat rhythm as a vessel for hidden knowledge, shaping sound the way mystics shape symbols. Drawing on esoteric texts, sacred imagery and improvisation, this coded manuscript turns noise into philosophy, vibration into shared language, parachuting us into the place where all the in-between notes live.

On his eighth album, his first since 2023’s ‘More Photographs,’ Kevin Morby returns from somewhere far. “Little Wide Open” is a road record across 13 tracks: tangled highways, small towns, roadside crosses, and rock-and-roll romance. From the engine-rumble of opener ‘Badlands’ to the open-armed homecoming of closer ‘Field Guide For The Butterflies,’ Morby writes with weary-eyed honesty.

On “Counting Sunsets”, out now on Northern Spy Records, the New York trio SUSS further distil their sound across ten songs, allowing plenty of space between the instrumentation. An intricate fusion of Americana ingredients and electronic soundscapes, this is their finest, most fully realised expression of “ambient country” yet — a lesson in minimalism from a band with delicate, discerning touches.

For all its preoccupation with what slips away — faces misremembered, friends taken too early, the houses we once lived in — “Who’s Keeping Time?” is markedly less solitary than anything Alela Diane has made since “To Be Still”. Michael Hurley’s death sent her back into the room with other musicians. The album doesn’t argue against loss; it gathers people around it.

On their self-titled debut “Amarante-Cerisier”, Marine Debilly Cerisier and Mauricio Amarante deliver a fitting addition to the canon of Francophone double-acts, with Fontaine and Areski as closest antecedent. Their free-form folk thrives on paradox and fruitful mystery, weaving insistent bone-dry strums, half-whispered vocals and the odd psychedelic keyboard swirl into a deceptive, refractive collection of sweet, sharp songs.

Adam Ross has become a lynchpin of the ever-fertile Scottish scene. As a songwriter, he is deceptively gentle: his melodies scurry, bound or lope along, sometimes jaunty, sometimes suffused with a light melancholy, while his lyrics are always witty and frequently biting. “Bring On the Apathy”, his third album under his own name, is his most mature and rewarding yet.

Sofra Trio release their debut EP “New Dawn” today via Worlds Within Worlds — a powerful meeting of musical traditions from Syria, Türkiye and the Balkans. Recorded live in a single take in Helsinki, the trio of Melisa Yıldırım (kamancha), Merve Abdurrahmani (piano) and Hadi Hrekes (percussion) move fluidly between composition and improvisation.

Henry Parker’s “The Dark Peak” delivers pristine, impeccably fingerpicked acoustic music recorded on the moors of the Peak District. An educated, high-end player, Parker shows a broad skillset and technical prowess throughout, without being overly flashy. With tight melodies and wonderfully evocative natural sounds permeating the songs, this mini-album is a gem.