Albums

Mike Davies shares his Top 10 Albums of 2020 featuring Eliza Gilkyson, Luke Jackson, Blackbird & Crow, Ben Bostick, Bruce Springsteen, David Keenan, Merry Hell & more.

Here are our Top 100 Folk Music Albums of 2020, selected from over 400 Album Reviews published on Folk Radio UK.

Sarah Jarosz’s stories are carved like a craftsman’s antique furniture, with an attention to detail and capacity for nuance lending these sketches a depth and realism that ensures repeated listening is a rewarding experience.

Most of these tunes will stick in your head and involve many a trip to Bandcamp and the equivalents, as well as the purchase of this album helping defray the 2020 losses to the festival organisers. That’s a win, win, win.

While EP2 owes more to American Roots than EP1, when the musicians are as good as this, the influences matter less than the intimacy of the playing. This is a group of musicians playing the music that they love, and doing it better than just about anyone else.

Steffen’s “The Dancer on the Hill” is an album that will demand to be listened to many times. Once the final notes of the beautiful closer drift away, you will want to go straight back to the beginning.

Calexico’s Seasonal Shift offers us a hefty helping of cheer from locales all around the world, at a time when we need it most. Plus, watch their new video featuring Bombino.

If you want to get to the heart and soul of Reveal Records, then bring this compilation into your home and let some inspired music light up your life…one of our finest modern-day record label collectives.

The songs on Tobias Ben Jacob’s ‘Refuge’ are important and significant and deserve to be heard. One of the best, certainly the most emotionally powerful, albums I’ve heard for many years.

With his slightly unorthodox approach to traditional music, Rowan Leslie has created a set of music that attempts the feat of Escaping the Dawn. While that may seem like something of a fool’s mission, this album clearly is not.

Songs of Govan Old is not only an album bursting with pride and passion to stir the heart and blood of any Scot, but a damn fine listen even if you don’t have a tartan stitch to your DNA.

Henry Martin, the latest offering from Edgelarks (Hannah Martin and Phillip Henry) is an album filled with positivity – resolutely optimistic, brilliantly played and a joy from start to finish.