Folk music

Ten albums is a long time in rock n’ roll, and My Morning Jacket have been on quite a trip since their birth in Louisville in the early 2000s. There’s been the colourful abandon of critics’ hit Z (2005), the unexpected Prince-meets-Cameo ‘Highly Suspicious’ on 2007’s Evil Urges (2007) and the hazy-guitar powered The Waterfall (2015). As its title suggests, is seems like the distillation...

Jeffrey Lewis is not your average recording artist. Over a span of almost 20 years he’s created a 13-issue comic book series, Fuff; his illustrations have been viewed in The New York Times, Time Out New York and The Guardian. He’s also designed album covers, drawn concert posters, pizza menus and hot sauce labels. His “song/comix” hybrids...

“The self-reflection in the title demonstrates a life lived. The songs are moments immortalised in time, bound together by nothing more than the human experience.” Thus Lancashire-born singer-songwriter Toria Wooff muses on the creation of her self-titled debut album. Launching herself fully onto the scene, she beguiles with tales of love, loss, hope and womanhood, wrapped...

Renowned songwriter Jason Isbell celebrated 13 years of sobriety in February of 2025. A well earned achievement that came after a difficult year in which Isbell filed for divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires in December of 2023. Isbell left the Drive-By Truckers in 2007 following a struggle with alcoholism, finding his way to sobriety in 2012. He...

Defining Neil Young is a fool’s task. Whatever Young you choose to describe only hints at the mercurial musician who has recorded everything from the gentlest of acoustic music to the almost unlistenable sounds residing on ARC. The 10 recordings that comprise Oceanside Countryside capture a largely acoustic artist playing with both pleasure and passion in 1977...

Polly Paulusma’s new album, Wildfires, goes against the grain. In an age of limited attention spans and content digested in quick doses, she has released a sprawling collection; 19 songs, each with a prologue that runs anywhere from 45-seconds to 3:49 and meant to be listened to in its entirety. A story of love that comes in...

The past five years have been quite a rollercoaster ride for London-born singer-songwriter Luke Sital-Singh, who embarked on a Transatlantic journey with his wife to live the Californian dream in Los Angeles five years ago, before returning to the UK. This brought highs such as the recording of his last album Dressing Like a Stranger as well as...

The gestation period for Patterson Hood’s Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams runs about 40 years. Which means events from his past have rung and stung him in different ways than they would have if some of the events described in these songs had been recorded more quickly. But distance brings with it a unique sense of perspective....

There are but three guarantees in life. Taxes, death and Seth Lakeman delivering magnificent albums. 13 studio albums and 23 years after he released his first solo effort, The Punch Bowl, Lakeman presents to the world a set that shows what you can do with a story and a song. From chasing the sinister ‘Black Fox’ across...

Tracking all the changes Nadia Reid has gone through since her last album, Out of My Province came out in 2020, it becomes obvious we are dealing with a very different woman, one who has had a series of changes. She has had two children, moved about half a world from New Zealand to Manchester, and recorded...