Artist of the Month

Gearing up to release Silver Horizon (out this Friday, 16th August), Sheffield-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Sam Carter talks to us about his distinctive new sound.

Silver Horizon sounds like nothing Sam Carter has made before. As subtle as it is adventurous and finely nuanced, it’s an excellent album and a career-high for Sam who is also our Artist of the Month.

It’s unusual to encounter a debut full-length album with as much confidence and clarity as Malin Lewis’s Halocline, which is also a work of subtle, nuanced beauty. We met with the Scottish piper to learn more about it.

Halocline, the debut album from Malin Lewis, our Artist of the Month, is a highly creative and singular forty minutes of music that’s unique in its character and emotion. Clever in its approach and balanced in its execution, in short, it’s quite exceptional.

Martin Simpson is our latest ‘Off the Shelf’ guest, in which we ask artists to present objects from a shelf or shelves from their home and talk about them. Martin’s new album, Skydancers, is out now on Topic Records.

Martin Simpson’s Skydancers is a beautifully packaged album. The music exudes class and quality, but what impresses most is the restraint. No notes are wasted and all instrumental flourishes land, enhancing each song. It is an excellent record from a master of his craft.

We met Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine to talk about their new Outliers album, a beautiful celebration of spontaneity and space, blending strong songwriting with acoustic arrangements and subtle electronics.

Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine’s Outliers revels in the beauty of the remote. While conceived and recorded entirely online, it feels astonishingly close. The attention to detail and clarity of sound are incredible, and their contributions are clearly defined yet entirely in accord.

We meet up with English folk masters Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden, our current Artists of the Month, to talk about their wonderful new album Glad Christmas Comes and rum topped diplomacy…

At sixteen songs, Eliza Carthy & Jon Boden’s “Glad Christmas Comes” is, appropriately, like a big Christmas lunch that you won’t want to finish. Beautiful music from two of our very finest and most valuable artists, it is a very easy album to love.

We talk to The Furrow Collective (Rachel Newton, Alasdair Roberts, Lucy Farrell and Emily Portman) about their new album, We Know by the Moon – a chilly delight: eleven folk songs blasted by winter winds and steeped in the glow of firelight and moonlight.

The Furrow Collective are simply one of the most formidable combinations of musicians in today’s folk music scene, and in “We Know by the Moon”, they have created one of the year’s outstanding albums.

We chat to Sheffield’s Melrose Quartet about their new album ‘Make the World Anew’ – a staunch defence of the sheer joy of creativity, allowing for contemporary political songwriting and age-old dance tunes, poignant a cappella standards and complex instrumentals.

Make The World Anew attempts in a small but determined way to achieve the edict set out in its title, and it succeeds resoundingly. It is the Melrose Quartet’s most upbeat and accomplished album to date.

As Kathryn Tickell and The Darkening return with their second album, Cloud Horizons, we chat with Kathryn about how the album came about, the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, mythical magic, the multicultural history of Northumbria, job-sharing singers and more.

Aptly described as ‘Ancient Northumbrian Futurism’, Kathryn Tickell and The Darkening’s ‘Cloud Horizons’ is an electrifying and incredibly captivating album. In capturing a sound that effortlessly conjures the past whilst simultaneously referencing the present and future, they have created a rather unique and striking soundscape.

We chat with Rónán Ó Snodaigh & Myles O’Reilly about their new album, The Beautiful Road, a work of graft and craft as well as exceptional artistry: music like this isn’t just plucked out of the air; it is the result of a serious and well-defined working relationship, nurtured over a period of years.

Myles O’Reilly recalls some of the magical moments experienced with Rónán Ó Snodaigh while making their new album, ‘The Beautiful Road’, at a “quaint cabin, isolated from the world’s noise…where boundaries between reality and imagination blur”.