Albums

MorganEve Swain’s “Babylon”, the second album from The Huntress and Holder of Hands, is a vivid, heavily weighted folk-rock album that traces how grief changes shape over time. Over a decade on from losing her husband Dave Lamb, Swain channels that long private reckoning into something communal and forward-looking — moving and epic, with a rough-hewn buoyancy that ultimately nudges toward light.

“Stash,” the second album from BCMC — the Chicago guitar-and-keys duo of Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — pulls a range of styles from their minimalist set-up. More excitable than 2023’s “Foreign Smokes,” the musicians are happy to explore dynamically within a song. This is a generous, joyous album, brimming with life, energy and a real love of music.

Frankie Archer’s debut album “The Dance of Death” combines traditional balladry with very contemporary-sounding electronica, resulting in a sound unlike anyone else. Built around the ideas of death and mortality, it is anything but one-dimensionally depressing. Archer is a one-of-a-kind talent with a huge career ahead of her.

On “These Are The Days That Turn Into Years”, their seventh studio album, Pharis & Jason Romero, following their 2022 release, channel four years of living, touring, parenting and banjo-building into their most open-hearted set yet. Tracked in their riverside Horsefly barn, it feels lived-in and luminous — a pure rootsy joyride that will send you straight back to the opening track.

“Sam Carter Sings Nic Jones,” recorded live at Celtic Connections, is a faithful, generous tribute to one of the UK’s finest folk musicians. Carter knows these songs inside out, and he delivers them with a real passion, as well as the care they deserve. It’s a record that hands the tradition on, proof that the cycle of folk music and storytelling is in good health.

MMM (Gayle Brogan, Elizabeth Still, Nick Jonah Davis) provide a fascinating, deep listening experience on “Lunistice Alignments”. The record covers a lot of sonic ground, each of the six tracks occupying a very different space and mood. Somehow sounding ancient and contemporary, light and dense: MMM ask for close attention and repay it in full.

Shabason & Krgovich’s “Four Days in June” is an album of subtle, often delicate layers, borrowing from country, sophisticated AOR, laid-back jazz and chamber-pop. This is music that settles on you gently, sometimes like a fine rain or sometimes like dust — songs that patiently take stock as their creators slip into middle age. Deceptively light, wholly profound art.

Emmett Kelly, Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney and Jim White have all done time in supergroups before. Could they handle it on a cold Tuesday night on a Bluetooth stereo in Glasgow? Alex Neilson gives an emphatic and unequivocal yes. Released in late 2024, “The Hard Quartet” carries all the messy, confounding joy of Dirty Three and Pavement, and makes you remember what you love about music.

New Mexico banjoist Johnny Bell builds “Mountain States” around the character of the five-string banjo, though his focus is far from traditional. There is unease and an underlying gravity to music that is stark, edgy and gnarly in places, with an ominous drone haunting throughout. He set out to make a modern solo banjo album, and he’s done exactly that.

A free jazz saxophonist known for incendiary live shows, Zoh Amba turns to thirteen guitar-based rock songs on “Eyes Full”, their raw, passionate singing to the fore. Sight and being seen thread the album, and a return to Kingsport reckons with the past. It’s an album so complete and so accomplished that it’s hard to believe that it’s their first foray into songwriting.

Eleven songs of top-drawer Americana, “Coin-O-Matic” is pure Deer Tick: unfiltered, honest, at ease in their own skin. Two decades in and self-produced for the first time, they draw on Rhode Island’s half-mythic characters and wear the Springsteen influence honestly with the closing five-song sweep, ultimately confirming the album’s quality — a long-storied band taking aim and hitting all their targets.

On “Long Live Brown Wimpenny,” the eleven-strong Manchester collective are, like The Watersons, both iconoclastic and deeply rooted in tradition. It works precisely because it isn’t a conscious decision: they are simply playing the songs that mean the most to them, in open collaboration and in a vernacular entirely their own — folk music that resounds with originality and freshness.