News

Today marks the release of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Ghosts of American Psychonauts (Domino Records). The eight-song set was recorded at The Pico Union Project in Los Angeles over Valentine’s Day weekend 2025, just a few weeks after the release of The Purple Bird. From that weekend, Oldham has shared a live video performance of “Trees of Hell”.

Blair Dunlop shares a live video for “Are You Loved?” ahead of tomorrow’s single release, previewing his sixth album “What Still Survives” (October 30th, Navigator Records). The song confronts social media’s grip on our need to be liked. Backed by Holly Carter, Jason Tebble and Fred Claridge, it names the problem instead of dancing around it.

JP Harris shares a video for “Hang Me,” the final single from his sixth album, “Shaving A Dead Man,” out October 23 on Bloodshot Records. Chance McCoy of Old Crow Medicine Show joins him on fiddle and harmonies. This is so far removed from the sterile, studio-perfect commercial versions out there; they return it to the soil.

Radie Peat announces her debut solo album “No Human Tongue Can Tell” and shares her new single “The Moon and Stars”, alongside an accompanying video directed by Peter Eason Daniels. The Lankum and ØXN vocalist rewrites a traditional song’s lyrics into a study of betrayal and abandonment. New dates at London’s Barbican and Paris’s La Trabendo have also been announced.

Martin Simpson shares a finely crafted solo performance of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” The track also appears on “Some Kind of Jubilee,” his new album marking fifty years since his “Golden Vanity” debut, and is out September 25th on Topic Records, with contributions from Greg Leisz, Zac Hobbs, Liz Hanks, Louis Campbell, and Ben Nicholls.

Featuring Ríoghnach Connolly, watch the accompanying video for ‘Curlew Song’, the new single from Clare Sands, taken from her upcoming album ‘They Tried to Bury Us’, out on October 9th. The album is a collection of songs that gives voice to the silenced: from the endangered curlew to those seeking refuge.

Bill Nace & Mike Polizze have announced “Live at Pageant : Soloveev”, recorded in 2025, following the release of Mike’s second solo album ‘Around Sound’. Thankfully, Mike captured this taishogoto and guitar face-off on his iPhone, allowing this unhindered exhibition of full-spectrum free string playing in its rawest form to be captured for us all to enjoy.

The Male Pattern, the project of Queens songwriter, novelist and English professor Will Schwartz, shares “Charlie (The Robbery)” from the forthcoming album “I Was Shot in the Heart!”, out September 25th via Barely Out Recordings. A character-driven narrative ballad featuring Danny Bateman of Frog on piano, it’s darkly funny, clever, and “sneakily beautiful”.

David Murphy & Ether Ensemble have shared “The Rain Song”, a reworking of the Led Zeppelin ballad for pedal steel guitar and seven-piece ensemble, with all Bandcamp proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders. The single follows Murphy’s acclaimed debut “Cuimhne Ghlinn”, which Glenn Kimpton called “an extraordinarily great album” in these pages. A new studio album is due in 2027.

Jon Wilks releases his rendition of “Geordie” on September 4th, marking fifty years of Martin Carthy’s “Crown of Horn.” Carthy’s version was so definitive that recording his own “always felt like turning up to a house that was already lived in.” The Songs of Martin Carthy tour changed that — two semitones up, with a new jaunt and swing.

Allison de Groot and Rich Ruth have today shared their second single, ‘Distance From Then’. With its earthy birdsong opening and unadorned banjo and violin, Ruth soon creates a whole world around it. As Allison says, “Like so much of the music on this album, our two very different musical worlds sent the tracks in unexpected directions.”

Watch the video for “Green Grow the Laurels”, Josienne Clarke’s stark new rendering of the traditional song, directed by Alec Bowman_Clarke. The single accompanies the announcement of “Regenerene MMXXVI”, a 12-track album that reveals her recent standalone singles are part of a larger return to the traditional material that first shaped her career.