Welsh musician Gwenifer Raymond's 2018 debut album, 'You Never Were Much of a Dancer', introduced a new voice on acoustic guitar, receiving 5 stars in The Guardian, big spreads in MOJO and UNCUT, and airplay on multiple BBC programmes. This led to months of touring on the European festival circuit. Her second album, 'Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain', finds Raymond ranging into unexplored experimental territory, drawing from her Welsh roots.

TRACK LISTING

1. Incantation
2. Hell For Certain
3. Worn Out Blues
4. Marseilles Bunkhouse, 3am
5. Gwaed Am Gwaed
6. Ruben's Song
7. Eulogy For Dead French Composer
8. Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain

Folk music has a bad habit of being presented as a deathly serious concern. It’s something you cry to, it’s overly sacred, it’s solemnly considered by critic-historians. But Folk Bitch Trio, former high school friends Heide Peverelle (they/them), Jeanie Pilkington (she/her) and Gracie Sinclair (she/her), have a shared sense of humour that is embedded deep in their music, and that sets it alight, safe from the self-serious traps of the genre. 'Now Would Be A Good Time', their debut album, tells vivid, visceral stories, and is funny and darkly ironic in the manner of writers like Mary Gaitskill or Otessa Moshfegh. Their music sounds familiar, but the songs are modern, youthful, singing acutely through dissociative daydreams and galling breakups, sexual fantasies and media overload, all the petty resentments and minor humiliations of being in your early twenties in the 2020s. Folk Bitch Trio have already toured across Australia, Europe and the US, supporting bands as disparate as King Gizzard, Alex G and Julia Jacklin. They’ve signed with Jagjaguwar, a home for singular icons and iconoclasts (Bon Iver, Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, UMO and others), and they’ve found their first diehard fans with dazzling harmonies and acerbic lyricism that transcend genre expectations and audience lines. These are the stakes: Learning how to live a life free of lovesickness and loser exes, when to sink into contemporary nihilism and when to have a laugh with your friends, and why being alive can feel so ephemeral and unreal. In this sense, 'Now Would Be A Good Time' feels like a manual for modern living: a missive from three proud Folk Bitches finding beauty and wisdom where they can, together.

TRACK LISTING

1. God's A Different Sword
2. Hotel TV
3. The Actor
4. Moth Song
5. I’ll Find A Way
6. Cathode Ray
7. Foreign Bird
8. That’s All She Wrote
9. Sarah
10. Mary’s Playing The Harp

'Kismet' is Matilda Mann's sophomore album and the follow-up to her acclaimed debut 'Roxwell'. The 11-track record finds Matilda writing from a place of hard-won peace and expansive joy – an album steeped in the bliss of being newly in love, the quiet beauty of chosen people, and a growing belief that the universe, more often than not, knows what it's doing. Featuring the singles 'Inventing' and 'Bittersweet', 'Kismet' represents a bold and confident step forward.

TRACK LISTING

TBA

Reissue of Gwenifer Raymond's debut 'You Were Never Much Of A Dancer' from 2018. Speaking about how her musical journey, Gwenifer says "When I was about eight years old a pretty formative thing happened to me, my mum bought me a cassette tape of Nirvana’s 'Nevermind'. Being so young I'd had no real interest in music prior to that, but I did have a ‘My First Sony’ cassette player that I used to listen to audiobooks. Anyway, I put the tape in, pressed play, and what I heard blew my little 8 year old mind. I don't know what it was about that wall of sound that so captured me, but I spent many hours hyperactively running around the house with headphones on, volume at full blast, and Nevermind on repeat. It was either for Christmas or my birthday that year, that I asked for a guitar.

"I spent all my teenage years playing either guitar or drums in various punk and rock outfits around the Welsh valleys, but around that time I was also getting seriously into older stuff, Dylan, The Velvet Underground and the like. Through those cheap compilation CDs you could get then, I found that a common influence amongst these guys was pre-war delta and country blues, as well as Appalachian music. Eventually I stumbled upon Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Roscoe Holcomb, and they became the holy trinity of musicians I so wanted to able to play like. Eventually, I tracked down a blues man in Cardiff who could teach me and it was in studying these guys that I was introduced to John Fahey and the whole American Primitive thing.

"I’ve always loved being in bands and the sonic chemistry it produces, but at the same time it’s always a bit of a compromise that those sounds in my head have to pass through and be translated by someone else’s. Sometimes it can be for the better, but sometimes not so much. American Primitive was the first time it had occurred to me that you didn’t really need anything more than one solo instrument to fully express yourself, especially when those feelings and moods refuse to be articulated in words, sometimes it's a mystery to yourself what it is you’re expressing. I still play in hard rock and punk bands and love to wail and hit my guitar with a complete lack of any subtlety or nuance, but in the end I think that all these things are really part of a circle, feeding back into itself. It’s all just a lineup of strange mutations."

TRACK LISTING

1. Off To See The Hangman, Part I 
2. Sometimes There's Blood 
3. Idumea 
4. Off To See The Hangman, Part II 
5. Face Down Strut 
6. Laika's Song 
7. Oh, Command Me Lord! 
8. Sweep It Up 
9. Requiem For John Fahey 
10. Dance Of The Everlasting Faint 
11. Bleeding Finger Blues 
12. Sack 'Em Up, Parts I And II 
13. It Was All Sackcloth And Ashes

Self-released on YouTube in 2013, 'Pearl' quietly became a huge hit in Brazil with the lead single and accompanying video for 'Quando Bate Aquela Saudade' amassing over 85 million views to date. Pearl laid the foundations for Rubel's path to greatness - a first glimpse into the brilliance of a modern- day troubadour and ever- evolving Brazilian artist who deftly mixes classic and contemporary influences. Fusing MPB, folk, pop, and indie, it charts Rubel at his purest and most personal.

The journey of 'Pearl' begins with Rubel in his early 20's studying film in Austin, Texas. Immersing himself in the city's vibrant DIY music scene and surrounded by countless musicians who he shared a large house with, he set up a home studio with an assortment of rented gear and recorded the album without any expectations. It was inspired by an environment of youth, music and experimentation Rubel found himself within. The seven songs are an attempt to record and take with him a little of what he lived and learned whilst there. He uploaded the album to YouTube, didn't think much of it and continued to pursue a career in film in LA. Over the next few years however it became a viral hit in Brazil, with a subsequent Brazil only vinyl and CD issue, drawing him both back to Rio and a trajectory to musical stardom.

The spirit of 'Pearl' has a timeless nostalgia; it feels familiar from the outset, and whether a Portuguese speaker or not, the songs touch your soul. It's an unpretentious album, with Rubel putting himself, his musicianship and his songwriting upfront and centre. The epic 'O Velho e o Mar' delicately layers acoustic guitar, banjo and vocal harmonies, as the track builds with a simmering intensity and an accordion drifts in across its final stages. Elsewhere, title track 'Pearl' has a global singer- songwriter aesthetic and could be Thom Yorke at his most acoustic. At nearly seven minutes, 'Quando Bate Aquela Saudade' is an unlikely breakthrough single, but its message really resonated with the Brazilian / Portuguese-speaking audience. Anyone who has witnessed Rubel live has felt the energy and interplay between musician and audience, with the crowd making this song as much their own as it is Rubel's. A true modern-day classic.

TRACK LISTING

1. O Velho e o Mar
2. Mascarados
3. Pearl
4. Quando Bate Aquela Saudade
5. Ben
6. Nuvem
7. Quadro Verde

“Sometimes life gets so dark, it starts to feel like a bad trip,” Lily Seabird reflects on the seasons that led to the making of her new record, 'Lightspheres on Their Way'. Seabird’s third record in as many years for Lame-O Records deals in mortality and reverence for the innately human, piecing her troubadour-ish folk to a grungy rock sentimentality. Though born from a period of reckoning and renewal, Seabird orients 'Lightspheres on Their Way' around a holistic realism that buoys the spirit, with loose, earthy arrangements that meet intensity and depth with both twangy spaciousness and searing drive.

Across the record’s nine tracks, the Vermont-based singer and songwriter orbits around the concept of “lightspheres,” a catalysing presence or force that visits time and time again and shifts stories, feelings and trajectories. “A lightsphere can be so many things” says Seabird, “ an actual light like a star, the sun, a UFO; headlights, a flashlight in the night; but also life, living things, people, relationships.”

Though 'Lightspheres on Their Way' marks a moment of ascension for Seabird’s songwriting, she asserts that “the most emotional parts of the record are instrumental.” The Crazy Horse stomp of 'Portal to the Past' and others stretch into spacious, jammy interludes and outros where Seabird and Rick Soszynski revel in fuzzy, gritty guitars. They act as moments of emotional decompression, like rolling down the windows and surrendering to the expanse of the open road. 'Lightspheres...' is a testament to the depths one can reach in their art when you stop trying to tell the story of what happened to you, and instead start talking about who you are.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Pulley
2. Bindlestiff
3. Election Day
4. Pennsy
5. Portal to the Past
6. Blackstar
7. Slipswitch
8. The Afterglow
9. Lightspheres on Their Way

'Shadowman' is the self-titled debut album from the new trio of John J Presley, producer Ben Hillier and broadcaster Danielle Perry.

John J Presley's purchase of a 70s Guild from the States was the starting point of this project... Months previous he had been working on new material with a focus on songwriting rather than tones and sounds and the addition of this new acoustic created a perfect match.. He took them to Ben Hillier to flesh out at his studio Agricultural Audio in Lewes. Together they found a spark and momentum and a collection of 10 songs were finished with their long time collaborator, and John J Presley's wife Danielle Perry. Instrumentalists Pete Wareham and Marcus Hamblett added extra colour and depth with their unique sax and brass textures. The album was engineered by Dan Crook.

The album sessions were fast and intuitive.. nothing went past the third take, and the panorama is wide - from crushing guitars to cinematic orchestration; New Orleans death march brass to motorik drum machines, layered vocal exchanges and moments of post-rock intensity. It tells stories of wedding singers, the intensity of the modern world and summer sun.

TRACK LISTING

1. You Are The Love
2. Don't Assume
3. New York In Spring
4. FLOWERS
5. Wedding Singer
6. On Fire
7. Waiting On The Old Songs
8. Look At You Now
9. Blonde
10. Summer Sun

From the fires and floods of the Australian bush on her debut 'Soon', 'Tiarn' now takes us to the shores of the Pacific Ocean where classical and electronic arrangements move with an ever-present longing for connection and nature. Stretton has weaved a new world, set on the brink of night, when the world is soft and suspended in blue. Living in isolation near the ocean, overlooking the winter migration of whales, Stretton would regularly swim during the brief 20-minute period known as the blue hour. Ideas would come to her in the icy salt water, and walking home in the dark, she would carry melodies back to record that night.

At its heart, 'Tiarn' reflects ecological grief and the search for connection in a changing world. 'Tiarn' is also inspired by a piece of home camera footage Stretton found of her family in Japan where they lived in the ‘90s before she was born. It shows the distant mountains, and Stretton’s young family looking over the valley in the soft static of one summer evening. Decades later, using the untouched synth her parents had bought in Tokyo in 1991, Stretton began recording music directly to that footage, letting the images dictate the melody. Voices, insects, weather, movement, and the ambient sounds of the valley are woven throughout the record itself, blurring the line between documentation and composition. The result is an album that feels less created than uncovered — something remembered rather than made. Stretton’s work continues to carve a singular path in contemporary music, balancing environmental awareness, experimental composition, and deeply personal storytelling. 'Tiarn'

TRACK LISTING

1. Nojiri 1993
2. Salt
3. Seagull Theory II
4. Stay Involved
5. As it Was Before This
6. Forest To The Sea
7. Stove
8. Right Whale
9. Off Stokes
10. Night Swimming
11. From