There is a specific kind of bravery required to be “post-cool.” In an industry obsessed with the frantic energy of the new or the polished artifice of the established, Bristol’s The Lovely Basement have opted for a third path: a relaxed, literate nonchalance that feels less like a performance and more like a conversation. Their 4th album, Lowlands, is a shimmering collection that suggests the band isn’t “too old to care,” but rather old enough to know exactly what is worth caring about.
Released through Precious Recordings of London, Lowlands is an album that demands a shift in the listener’s internal metronome. It has been described as an easygoing listen, but don’t mistake that for background music. This is music that lowers your blood pressure…
Category: americana
The Kentucky Headhunters have reissued Big Boss Man, a one-of-a-kind project originally recorded in partnership with Sony/ATV Music Publishing two decades ago.
Long considered a hidden gem within the band’s catalog, Big Boss Man returns as a newly remastered, fully restored project, released on the band’s own Practice House Records label. The origins of the project go back to 2005, when then Sony/ATV President Donna Hilley, compilation supervisor Jack Jackson and creative director of new music Tom Long, approached The Headhunters with an idea to take 12 classics from the Sony/ATV catalog and “Headhunterize” them, infusing each song with the group’s signature energy. The purpose behind the project was to breathe…
A balladeer of bad decisions, Darrin Hacquard is the soundtrack to doing something you’ll regret, and the repercussions you’ve earned. From being in a string band with acclaimed singer-songwriter John R. Miller, to stints in county lock-up and rehab, to grinding his songs out on the Appalachian songwriter circuit Weights & Measures is the culmination of hard-living, harder work, and honest autobiographical songwriting that admits to life experiences many have but are seldom shared.
Hacquard, now based out of Huntington, W.Va, writes with the storytelling of Tom T. Hall, the emotional honesty of Vic Chesnutt, and a sense of place like Breece Pancake.
If you walked into a bar or a hall anywhere in the US and found that Darrin Hacquard and…
Fallen Angel, The Unfaithful Servants’ second full-length release, serves up a splendid sampling of the Vancouver Island-based quartet’s distinctive take on contemporary Americana.
Call it newgrass, if you will, which necessarily entails a predominant bluegrass component augmented by lots of swing, tricky time changes, nicely woven melodic lines and the occasional hint of rock/pop in the mix.
The Canadian band’s line-up of uber-talented whippersnappers consists of mandolinist Jesse Cobb (founding member of The Infamous Stringdusters), singer-songwriter-guitarist Dylan Stone, fiddle virtuoso Quin Etheridge-Pedden and bassist Mark Johnson.
‘Endless Highway’ sets the stage for…
Nashville bluegrass banjo stalwart Wes Corbett’s new album, Drift, is surprisingly spectacular. A member of the Sam Bush Band, Corbett realised that recording an all-instrumental album of original bluegrass tunes in Nashville meant he had access to some of the best players in the world.
Naturally Sam Bush joins, but the album is also graced by mega names like Sierra Hull, Bryan Sutton, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, members of the Punch Brothers, Darol Anger, and more.
Of course, this virtuosity is for nought without great tunes, and Corbett delivers here. The arrangements are shaped for each mini ensemble, so ‘Crane Island’, with Darol Anger, spins into experimental fiddling, while ‘Riptide’ with Hull, Sutton and Keith-Hynes powers through…
Steve Hammond stayed plenty busy in 2025. First, he released an album with his thrash metal band Ice Queen. Last, he put out an album of charming lo-fi recordings under his own name. And in between, he and his country band The AM’s rolled out Here Comes That Broken Heart, a set of 12 tunes that would sound great coming out of an old wobbly phonograph or perhaps off the corner stage in some not-that-cool dive bar. Hammond and “Pony Dan” Prockup split the writing duties, and both steer their songs into interesting places by incorporating pop, psych, punk spirit, and especially snappy ‘60s soul into their malleable honky-tonk.
…The music of The AM’s sounds like something you’d hear creaking out of an old console…
The pitch for the music of The Far West, whose new album is their first since 2014, is “horribly painful songs that you can dance to”, according to bass player Robert Black.
There is less pain, however, than resignation and expectation, but the arrangements often mask this. There are more swayalongs than hootenannies here, but Black is right about danceability on the infectious ‘Meet Me Where We Parted Last’, which uses the horn section well, and the far too short ‘In Your Own Time’ (“things will come, just as surely as the rising sun”).
‘See for Yourself’ opens the album with the sort of music Bob Dylan was making for ‘Blonde On Blonde’; indeed, there’s a lyrical nod to the man on “this rolling stone is now covered in moss”.
ha ha, now i’m sad is LA-based Cooper Kenward’s third album after Cooper Kenward (2022) and Dying in a Diner (2024). It takes you back to the seventies, with its Steely Dan-like pop, and you can even hear an echo of 10CC at one point. It features some great songs and melodies, often accompanied by gentle slide or lead guitar, and steel guitar and fiddle, which lends a country flavour at times. Brass and keyboards are used too, and the music is very easy on the ear. In addition, Kenward’s words have a quirky originality – both lighthearted and then more serious in turn, hence the title “ha ha, now I’m sad”– which sparks a real interest.
The album gets off to a cracking start with some glam rock drums leading into ‘53’ Bel Air’. It’s warm nostalgia for those of us of a certain…
Holly Carter may not be a name that readers are too familiar with, but it is very likely that she soon will be, for she is a prodigious talent. Her main claim to fame so far is that she was voted best instrumentalist in the Americana Music Association UK awards in 2023 and again in 2024. Her fingerpicking acoustic and electric guitar-playing style, together with being one of the few professional female steel guitar players in the UK, attest to her musical ability, and you can add to that a substantial songwriting skill. And now comes her first full-length album, Leave Your Mark.
Carter is based in Bristol, currently a hotbed of musical talent, and has made something of a name for herself with her gigs local to that area, as well as appearances at various music…
Zac Brown Band returns with Love & Fear, a sweeping 13-track album that marks a bold new chapter for the GRAMMY-winning group. Released in tandem with the launch of their landmark Sphere residency in Las Vegas, the record arrives at a pivotal moment—one that sees the band leaning fully into emotional honesty, adventurous production, and the genre-blending instincts that have defined their legacy. With a slate of high-profile collaborations, including Dolly Parton, Snoop Dogg, and Marcus King, the project immediately positions itself as one of the band’s most ambitious and expansive bodies of work to date.
Built around themes of resilience, duality, and introspection, ‘Love & Fear’ explores the push and pull between life’s light and shadow…
Music for Roads is a cross-cultural collaboration between Nordic jazz and indie folk/americana players, including Finnish trumpet player Verneri Pohjola, Finnish americana/folk band Tuomo & Markus, Finnish drummer Jaska Lukkarinen, French saxophonist Sylvain Rifflet and American guitarist and multi-collaborator Marc Ribot. The album is, for us at least, best described as ambient-americana, a term that seems to translate as music for unmade movies that would require an americana-ish soundtrack. What kind of roads, though – and what genre of film – are two very valid questions. Certainly on the opening piece ‘Appalachian Landscape‘ there’s a sudden journey into a wide-open landscape, with folky guitar quickly brightened by expansive…
There’s a difference between merely recording songs and making an album. By the time The Mammals realized they were doing the latter, they had nearly enough music for two LPs. So, the indie-roots band arranged the tracks into the double album Touch Grass. The first volume leans toward socially conscious tracks, while Vol. 2 has a more personal, introspective feel.
…It was sometime in late 2021 or early ’22 when Merenda and Ungar began doing weekly recording sessions at their Humble Abode Music studio with bassist/engineer Brandon Morrison.
The plan when they started was to make demos of the songs that Merenda and Ungar had been writing following the release of the Mammals’ 2020 album Nonet.
Singer and songwriter Morgan Wade has extended her celebrated recent album ‘The Party Is Over (recovered)’, adding five new tracks for a Deluxe version.
The Party Is Over (recovered) follows Wade’s recent album, “Obsessed”, which was released in August 2024. In a time of self-reflection, Wade revisited her earlier writing sessions to revitalise past songs that still spoke to the person she is today. She has also been playing some of its tracks on the road to sold-out shows across the US, UK and Europe. These songs, which so many fans have gravitated to live, will, for the first time ever, be made available, connecting Wade’s past and present and breathing new life into her earlier songs.
“The Party Is Over (recovered)” sees Wade…
East Side Confessions is KB Bayley’s third album, and it has a delightful melancholy feel to it. It feels sparse yet layered, mostly thanks to his excellent lap steel guitar playing, which is quite stunning and is accompanied delightfully by several guests who lift his playing even further. It mixes six original songs with four interpretations, the most unusual one of which is his version of the Korgis hit ‘Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime’. He has completely changed the feeling of what was a pretty ordinary ’70s song into something quite enigmatic and far more appealing.
‘Don’t Let the Rain Fall on My Face’ has an intense Southern swamp feel to it. It relates to the last words and reflections of a dying man, someone being hanged, “They are putting up…
Daylight Heart Moonlight Soul is the first album from Belfast-based Slow Autumn, although they have previously released a couple of singles, ‘Wash Me in the Fading Light’ and ‘Lean into the Night’. They say their music is for fans of Wilco, Jason Isbell, and John Moreland, and this is a good starting point, though it is a little gentler in reality. It is laid-back americana, with, for example, the lead guitar, piano and keyboard heard in many tracks not being pushed to the fore. The melodies and choruses in the songs are good, and the relaxed sound is a pleasure to listen to. You can imagine that they would give a live audience a decent night out.
The band say that they are influenced by Dylan, and you can hear this in some of…
Germany’s Bear Family Records deserves plaudits for compiling and releasing exhaustive box sets from some of the best-known figures in early country and rock music. But the reissue label warrants at least as much praise for unearthing and taking a chance on superlative material that most listeners have never even heard of, much less heard.
A perfect example of this is the new Rich-R-Tone Folk Star Story, which fills 12 CDs and has a playing time of more than 14 hours. It collects records released between 1946 and 1954 by Rich-R-Tone, a small, independent Johnson City, Tennessee, label, and its Folk Star subsidiary. The box comes with a coffee table–sized, 144-page hardcover…