Entrancing tunes to calm the soul… Alice Phoebe Lou’s sixth album, Oblivion, arrives just two years after Shelter (2023), yet feels like it’s been growing quietly in some sun-dappled corner of the world, waiting for the right moment to unfurl. Recorded in an intimate, improvisational spirit, Lou has spoken of “opening my treasure chest of personal storytelling songs” and leaning into imperfection. The result is an album that shrugs off grandeur in favour of something far rarer: genuine tenderness.
From the opening bars, Oblivion casts a hushed spell. A jazzy Bossa nova breeze runs through several tracks, content to drift rather than demand. On paper, that could spell background music. In practice, Lou’s vocals stop you in your tracks. Sultry and hypnotic, she can sound like…
Category: indie-folk
Americana is nothing if not a broad brush. In the case of Signe Marie Rustad, it is a genre that stretches as far as her native Norway. Do You Know Something I Don’t is the Norwegian artist’s fifth studio album, if studio is the right word for a recording made live at the Oslo Concert Hall. The intimate Lille Sal has an adjacent recording studio, so we have the unusual mix of a one-take studio recording with a live audience in attendance.
In her native Norway, Rustad has garnered just about every accolade going and is renowned for mixing things up and never making the same album twice. It was this desire to escape the straight-jacket cycle of record and release that led Rustad to toy with the idea of replicating the unique feel of playing in front of an audience,…
There’s a timeline where Eliza McLamb is nearly finished with a law degree, and another where she’s climbed the corporate ladder in the solar paneling industry. In lieu of that, McLamb has fully committed herself to music, something that was once a hobby. At nineteen she gained TikTok virality from a replayable ditty about adolescent sexual confusion, and used that wit and self-awareness as a jumping off point for the career she’s built since. Now at twenty-four, McLamb’s sophomore album Good Story is her first release after stepping away as co-host of Binchtopia, the prolific and successful podcast she ran with Julia Hava. She doesn’t take the trial and error for granted, though.
…“Catch it quick/Frame the image/Make your…
Deep Country is an anthology-like collection by Bruiser and Bicycle. Spanning across 15 songs the band shows a rich appreciation for disparate styles of music, with notes of jangle pop, art rock, tin pan alley, americana, and progressive folk.
…While their sophomore album, 2023’s Holy Red Wagon, stuck its toe over the hour line by a single minute, their third LP saunters in sound and runtime, clocking in at just shy of 75 minutes. The Albany quartet rummage through a bin of acoustic instruments and vocal tricks to indulge in the art of low-key merrymaking until you lose track of time alongside them.
Bandleaders and multi-instrumentalists Keegan Graziane and Nicholas Whittemore, bassist Zahra Houacine, and drummer Joe Taurone…
…includes two new covers and two French-language versions of standout tracks from the original album.
Rarely are there albums as openly vulnerable and sparse as Clara Mann’s Rift. Jessica Pratt’s Here in the Pitch comes to mind for its intimacy, but that latest LP still has an underlying gloss.
Mann’s record is rawer, every minuscule movement picked up by the microphones. Along with her unique vocals and songwriting, these sounds allow the listener to develop a connection with Mann to better understand the hard times she’s gone through. The Franco-British singer-songwriter characterizes her music as “almost folk,” because even though her music is rooted in the tradition, additional unconventional choices separate…
The Doldrums is the debut solo release from Canadian singer-songwriter Ellen Braun. She is based in Canmore, Alberta and is also a member of indie folk duo Trundled with Joe Shea.
Braun recorded the 10-song collection mostly live at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango with producer Howard Bilerman. The album features a full-band performance with Stef Schneider (percussion), Sage Reynolds (upright bass), Mike O’Brien (guitars), and Sarah Hiltz (vocals and keys) and the “Nashville” choir, comprising Hiltz, Stephanie Gagnon, Laura Newman, Babette Hayward, William Kuklis, and Joseph Shea.
Of the album’s title, Braun explains: “Someone once told me, ‘It’s not too late to change the name of your album’. Well, it is now, and…
There’s a marked crossover from Celtic folk music at the moment. The Mary Wallopers now fill major rooms, while the likes of Lankum and Kingfishr edge the genre into the mainstream. Leading this charge are Brògeal, mixing the similarly imbued folk-punk of The Pogues and The Dubliners with indie-rock grandeur. Emerging during COVID, the band have since played pub basements up and down the country, packed festival stages, and nailed some high-profile support slots.
Each song layers vivid images of the pubs and streets of their home town of Falkirk (‘Vicar Street Days’), and its people (‘Draw the Line’), making the record an immersive scrapbook of vignettes. But beneath the frenzied tales of beer-soaked nights runs a remarkably delicate…
Far from Nowhere is Josienne Clarke’s sixth album. She started in 2019 with In All Weather and her last album was 2024’s Parenthesis, I. Far from Nowhere was recorded in a week in a cabin in the remote Scottish Highlands using just a few instruments and analogue recording equipment. Murray Collier aided and abetted the process as co-producer. Clarke says that the record is a “defiant response to the logistical and emotional tolls of trying to eke out a living in the music industry”. She continues, “The structure of the industry slowly suffocates the spirit of artists, starving them of the self-esteem that comes from remuneration for a job well done, so retreating to a cabin in the woods to make my album made sense”.
Clarke is a folk artist, although her 2021…
After an eight-year pause, The Barr Brothers return with their latest release, Let It Hiss, an album arising from a period of personal and professional challenges that temporarily derailed them. As the band notes, the album’s title is a reference to their approach to writing and recording the album in the aftermath, “To leave the hiss in. The discomfort, the imperfection, the struggle, and allow the music to breathe again”. The album features ten songs of emotionally charged songwriting that make a stylistic leap from previous recordings, while still retaining the core elements of their trademark sound. Thematically, the songs reflect the band’s experiences and shifts in their lives over the past few years with lyrics that revel in the messiness of everyday life.
Six years after 2019’s Fever Dream, Of Monsters and Men returned with their fourth full-length, All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade. Hitting on the highs and lows of life, the Icelandic quintet stick close to their established sound: touching and tender indie folk anthems that play on earnestness and innocence. The vocal interplay between Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar “Raggi” Þórhallsson remains the primary draw, with the band — Brynjar Leifsson, Kristján Páll Kristjánsson, and Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson — wrapping listeners in the warm sonic hug that the group is known for. These are intimate peeks into life, both the good and bad, or the love and the pain from the album’s title. The simplicity helps focus the effort, which dials back the bombast of…
With her full-length Skullcrusher debut, Quiet the Room, Helen Ballentine established a floaty, almost ambient sound, one where songs were swathed in gossamer layers of synths, guitars, strings, field recordings, and unidentifiable electronic whispers alongside wispy, ruminative vocals and introspective lyrics. If anything, she takes this sense of untethered atmosphere even further on And Your Song Is Like a Circle. She began working on the album after moving across the country from Los Angeles to upstate New York, a move that was followed by long periods of isolation. She assembled it somewhat piecemeal, capturing ideas over a period of three years and recording them at home, at friends’ studios, and with Aaron Paul O’Brien (Los Angeles) and…
Prolific multi-diamond artist and producer SYML invites listeners into an intimate space with his new live album, Paris Unplugged.
Recorded while in Paris, France, this past summer at Le Consulat, the album distills his emotional songwriting into an unfiltered performance that feels deeply personal and universally moving.
Accompanied by Brian Eichelberger, Zawadi Morrow, and Kyle Moore, the songs are stripped of excess production, revealing the fragile heart at the center of his music and offering fans a chance to experience the closeness of his live shows-where silence, melody, and emotion intertwine. This is SYML at his most human: present, unguarded, and profoundly connected to those listening.
Brian Fennell adds, “I was on the roof three…
Sister John have been about for a few years now so it is perhaps no surprise that there is much in the way of maturity to be found in the words and music that make up the fifteen songs of Don’t Worry, It’s Forever.
It would be easy, therefore, to regard this album as being a serious one. One that successfully combines melody and melancholy as part of this band’s musical recipe for emotional catharsis. One that injects elements of both fragility and heartfelt sentiment into a framework that many might regard as an indication that the inside has become the new outside even if Sister John – Amanda McKeown, Jonathan Lilley, Sophie Pragnell, and Heather Phillip – do so whilst sounding like they have just walked out of the mists of the past.
Capturing light is not easy: ask any outdoor photographer. In order to capture the perfect shot, one has to be ready for fragmentary shifts in illumination. In that spirit, Caught Light is Great Lake Swimmers’ ninth album, and perhaps their most nimble: be prepared, don’t overthink, act fast.
Founder Tony Dekker has always been akin to a wildlife photographer, often choosing to make records in unique surroundings with a connection to Ontario history. This time he holed up in the Ganaraska Forest, between Peterborough and Port Hope, with producer Darcy Yates (Bahamas) and engineer Jimmy Bowskill (Blue Rodeo). Their goal was to tap the warmth of early ’70s folk/pop/rock, whether it be the cozy sonic sweater of Gordon Lightfoot’s classic work, or the gentleness…
Madi Diaz has always centered introspection and emotion in her songs, but in 2021, she made her Anti- label debut with History of a Feeling, an album that reacted to a painful breakup. She continued to process feelings and mental states from the aftermath on 2024’s poignant Weird Faith, a release that bagged her two Grammy nominations. In what could be considered the final entry in a trilogy, Fatal Optimist finds Diaz still examining what went wrong (“My toxic trait is hanging on/Your toxic trait is showing up”) and what lessons she should take away from it on a stripped-down set of acoustic guitar songs produced by Diaz and Gabe Wax. In an effort to reflect the experience of being alone, most of the songs here feature only two…
Don’t you just love an album with a fascinating back story? Well, this album has one and is quite different to the norm because of it. Laura Veirs is a singer-songwriter, based in Portland, Oregon, but that’s by no means the full story. Veirs is also an author, writing a book; Libba: The Magnificent Musical Life of Elizabeth Cotten, published in 2018 it was aimed at children. It tells the story of Cotten, an influential musician, a self-taught left-handed guitar player, who played a right-handed guitar upside down, and developed a style of playing which has influenced many players since. Veirs is a long-term fan of Cotten’s work. Additionally in 2018, she launched a weekly podcast with tales of working musicians who are also parents; the podcast…
Should music academics ever require evidence as to how a singer-songwriter/musician matures and develops over a short period of time, then there could be no better artist to use as a case study than Katie Spencer. Leaving aside an impressive and increasingly formidable catalogue of live work, in respect of her recorded output alone, the journey, from the release of a highly praised debut album, Weather Beaten in 2019, followed by 2022’s The Edge of the Land, which reached Number 14 in the Official Folk Charts, to What Love Is, her third and latest stunning release, provides more than ample material to satisfy any of those abovementioned scholars.
Katie’s musical history has been well-documented, raised by music- loving parents in…
Erica Dunn plays an unhinged guitar in Tropical Fuck Storm and leads the rowdy pop-tinged punk band Mod Con, but the Palm Springs project has a whole different vibe: acoustic, unvarnished, a bit somber, and emotionally revealing.
This is a mostly solitary, inward-looking endeavor that has to fit in between the artist’s other obligations. As a result, Palm Springs releases have been somewhat widely spaced out: debut Palm Springs & Friends in 2018, a rarities compilation A Collection of Songs in 2021, and now the eight-song Turning Yr Back on the Dolphin.
Here, Dunn’s songs are framed by low-toned, agile guitar picking, rooted in folk but slipping off, sometimes into jazz. To this, she adds the barest of additional elements: occasional…