Category: indie-folk


…CD edition features the Bob Dylan cover “In the Summertime”.
Margaret Glaspy’s latest album, I Am Both, is a low-key masterwork of observational wisdom, lilting melodies, and sharp wit. She delivers her stinging lines with a conversational ease, wielding the authority of hard-won experience over ringing guitar licks that echo the guilelessness of her storytelling. Her intimacy compels us to immediately identify with the singer, even when she is singing about people other than herself.
…On songs such as the dreamy “Common Ground” and the more somber “Petty”, the singer bites off lyrics about mutual disappointments. She keeps the lyrics simple to show how basic and trivial spitefulness can be, and at the same…

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Sometimes, all you need is a change. When Nora Stanley, an accomplished saxophonist who has worked with, among others, Beth Orton and The New Pornographers, moved to New York City from Oakland, California, she didn’t know she’d be inspired to write so many songs that she’d release an album of her own. “It’s a very unique and specific experience to live in a city that’s hyper-stimulating,” Stanley says.
Her songs are elegant, poetic, and lush, more of a retreat from the city’s chaos. They act as a way for Stanley to “slow things down and process them.” An experienced collaborator herself, Stanley enlisted a wide range of musicians for her debut album, including Shahzad Ismaily, Benny Bock, and Nate Mendelsohn.

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How to honor women? Nina Winder-Lind, the Swedish songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, follows that exact question throughout her debut album, Wild Love. Comprised of songs so ephemeral that they refute their own existence, as if they had emerged ex nihilo and could disappear again. Like an interlocutor, Winder-Lind listens to her ancestors’ tales, tracing a lineage from them to her to the past she will become to someone else. When performing as a member of the Brighton-based, post-punk band the New Eves, Winder-Lind inveighs against a patriarchal society, backed by three other steadfast Eves. What you will hear is her guttural, quivering vibrato reverberating over a bowed cello, played with such verve and stridency it could be the rumbling of earth…

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In the music industry, rawness is a commodity. Struggle and hardship alone are not enough. They have to be tapped into. They have to be shaped. This process of shaping is sometimes called art, but it also results in a product fit to be sold and consumed, however ragged, however scratchy it may seem. Some artists understand that they are trapped in this paradoxical bind, but they don’t necessarily know how to escape from it. Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain fall into this group. Others have successfully learned to laugh at it from the outside, using surreal humour as a distancing technique even as their music leans into the lo-fi. Think early Stephen Malkmus.
Sometimes a new artist emerges, a fresh voice with a fresh take on confession and…

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t would be hard to find a more arresting opener to any album of 2026 than the jarring discordant flutes and blast of brass which announce Grace Cummings’ fourth LP, Bloodhorse! In fact, let’s push that further and boldly say it would be impossible. Opening track ‘The Hills are Alive …’ arrives with a sudden impact of unusual sounds from all directions; there’s no chance of giving this music only half your attention. If you had hoped to press play, sit back and let the music fill your background, you’ll be disappointed. Cummings belts out “The hills are alive with the sound of – ” and, as the subject of the song appears, the music develops into a big, bold orchestral journey; it’s a clichéd epic presented in an entirely serious juxtaposition with the subject matter.

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Interviewed by MOJO around her 2020 album Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers admitted she nearly quit high school through sheer lack of motivation. “Then I found something that I would do forever,” she said, explaining how music changed her life. Six years after her last solo record, however, fans of her reflective, raw-nerved songwriting might have wondered if she was having second thoughts. Boygenius, her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, explained a couple of years, but there was still a sense Bridgers was in retreat.
Partly that seemed a result of the intrusions that come when an artist’s acute gift for articulating difficult emotions leads people to think they know them. There was also the unhealthy fascination with her personal life (she dated…

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In retrospect, Laura Veirs‘ 12th album Found Light was something of an artistic turning point for the Portland musician. It was a break-up album, contemplating the end of her marriage, but also her first album that she co-produced. An album of demo tracks recorded on her phone followed in 2023, and now we have Temple Songs, the very definition of a DIY album.
Temple Songs is the first album that she’s written, recorded, produced and performed entirely on her own. It was quite literally recorded in Veirs’ backyard. She’s built her own studio and recorded this album using just a laptop and two microphones, and the entire album is simply Veirs’ voice, some delicate acoustic guitar and the odd instrumental embellishment.

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Over the past several years, Maris O’Tierney established herself as an engaging, evocative songwriter and musician as one half of Maeve & Quinn, the duo she formed with her twin sister, Bryce. The pair released exquisite records such as the EPs Something Overheard, Something Overhead (2018) and Star-Crossed (2021), as well as 2023’s full-length release, Another Door, drawing inspiration from multiple points of origin: where they grew up (Alaska), the country of their heritage (Ireland), and their current hometown (Chicago). While Maris has stepped out with her first solo album under the moniker Park Hills Circle, she still retains the sensibilities of that duo, along with additional sonic layers that give this debut a warm uniqueness.

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Singer-songwriter Bird, otherwise known as Janie Price, has released a new full-length album. Held Here Together is made up of her two recent EPs, 2025’s Heads Or Tales and Strange As Folk from earlier this year.
This can be a risky strategy as reusing material again quickly can put off existing fans. On this occasion it may well be a marketing masterstroke as she has a tour supporting Ward Thomas to expose her to a whole new audience, and 3 new songs to keep her current crowd happy.
Bird’s trademark sound is rich, swelling strings building what would otherwise be relatively bare folk songs into something that Van Dyke Parks would be proud of. The song order on Bandcamp is different to that sent to us, pulling…

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It is tempting to search the Family Stereo debut album for lyrical snippets that talk of upbringing and home life, like a musical busybody. For the pseudonym belongs to Blake Watt, the twenty-something son of Everything But the Girl parents Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn. Doesn’t that make you feel old?!
Yet on The Thread that, emphatically, is where the musical similarities end, in spite of the occasional richness suggesting the tonal qualities of his mother’s vocal, or the poised songwriting with which his father has made an understated impact as a solo artist.
Those are mere sidelines, happily, for it is clear Watt has forged his own musical path and can easily stand on his own two musical feet.

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Who needs a style when you’ve got the songs? We’re living in a musical landscape mediated by algorithmic overlords, in which listeners often seek to be soothed by (possibly evil) ambient tones, burrow deeper into (often frictionless) aesthetics they already like, and passively consume (AI-generated?) tracks suited for various lifestyle functions. People of taste have been decrying the public’s preference for familiar slop over challenging, adventurous, hard-to-categorize art from time immemorial, but in the music world, the streaming era has intensified the primacy of vibes over tunes. Mallory Hawk’s Chinook flies in the face of that conventional wisdom.
…Chinook is named for the helicopters that dotted the sky during Hawk’s childhood in…

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It is more than twenty years since Mick Flannery released his debut album Evening Train, but the tale it told of (as he puts it) “love, lust, gambling, and a faithful betrayal” has obviously preyed on his mind as he has carved out a feted musical career. Now he has reworked the songs from that record and added ten new ones into an album which accompanies a stage production. The House Must Win has already played to 17,000 people in Ireland over a five-week run. This could be termed the soundtrack album, and Flannery has clearly poured his heart and soul into it.
He has gathered a stellar cast of musicians and guest artists for the recording, including Anais Mitchell, Jenn Grand, Lisa Hannigan and others on vocals, as well as sundry Flannerys.

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It doesn’t seem that long ago that singer-songwriter Maya de Vitry’s former group, The Stray Birds, was charming audiences.
Yet that ended in 2018, and de Vitry has been prolific since, issuing her fifth solo album, All My Faith. The album is self-produced and comes on her own independent label, Mad Maker Studio. She originally hails from Lancaster, PA, but has resided in Nashville for nearly a decade. Her crystalline voice is the essence of beauty, while her songwriting continues to grow in personal expression and imagery.
The album embraces folk music, folk-rock, and alt-country influences. Simply put, she’s leaning more toward country here than on her previous releases. The project, recorded in three…

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…features twelve new songs widely available for the first time: stripped-back versions of songs written before the recording of ‘I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!’ had finished, live favourites heard on McRae’s recent headline tours and festivals appearances, a new version of “Mother Wound” featuring Maisie Peters as well as new tracks elsewhere featuring contributions from Brandi Carlile and Brittney Spencer.
Ever since the release of her stand-out ‘Who Hurt You?’ EP back in 2021, Jensen McRae has been marked out as a special songwriter. Even in that early foray, the Californian managed to effortlessly distil an array of powerful emotions into its six tracks in a way that felt, in moments, truly heartbreaking. So it feels more than…

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If there were a collective appreciation of dramatic album intros of the year, then Babylon, the latest offering from The Huntress and the Holder of Hands, would definitely be a big part of the conversation. Like a film where the opening shot is a post-apocalyptic barren landscape, smoke from a recently grounded fighter jet still billows, fragments of civilisation lie broken and motionless, nature fights back amid scattered rubble, and, above, a clear blue sky appears impossibly tranquil and unattainable. Then heaving into view comes a solitary human frame, still very much alive but lost, lonely and desperate among the overwhelming destruction that surrounds. That very place, or at least a personalised assimilation of it, is where this album drops us with…

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For listeners drawn to the quietly adventurous music of Aldous Harding, Cate Le Bon or Jessica Pratt, Half Truth, by California songwriter Avery Hellman, who performs as Ismay, will feel like a welcome discovery. Folk, americana and indie influences intertwine throughout the album, producing songs that are musically understated yet emotionally rich. These are not songs that announce themselves immediately. Instead, Half Truth rewards patience, revealing carefully observed lyrics and subtle arrangements that slowly gather emotional weight.
The title track introduces one of the album’s central concerns: the difficulty of honest communication. “Half truth I’d like to disappear” becomes both confession and defence, as…

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SYML releases deluxe of live album Paris Unplugged. First captured live at Le Consulat Voltaire in Paris, France, the original 16-track set has been expanded into a 20-track deluxe edition. The newly expanded tracklist features his highly sought-after cover of “Mr. Sandman (Paris Unplugged Live).”
SYML shares: “I want to say that I always knew I would one day record a live album of my songs in Paris, but that’s not true. What a gift it’s been to perform these songs outside of my bedroom when I wrote them years ago, much less in Paris. Some of my favorite albums growing up were live records, and in hindsight I think it was the imperfections, the sound of the room, and the slight variations on familiar music that attracted me.

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She may have recently come to wider attention thanks to her theme song (“The Wise Man’s Song”) and score for the hit Mackenzie Crook series Small Prophets, but for those of us in the know, Amelia Baker, better known as Cinder Well, has been a leading light in the alt-folk scene for over a decade. Following a starkly expressive debut EP in 2015, she released three albums of spellbinding songcraft and ever-increasing sonic depth.
She has a reputation as a purveyor of dark folk – hints of discord, lyrics rich with symbolic meaning – but this is only half the story, because Baker is also a talented melodicist whose songs stretch out and unfold with a natural if sometimes mysterious grace, drawing in influences from unexpected quarters. And as it turns out,…

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