Here’s another half a dozen or so new folk tracks for your delectation and delight. Quite a varied crop, with a couple looking to future directions for folk, a couple of Irish-inspired productions and a couple of songs that can’t fully decide if they are folk or americana, if there really is such a huge distinction. No particular theme seemed to appear as we put the list together, we’ll try harder next time. Maybe.
Celtic Cross are a New York–based Irish-American band led by siblings Kathleen Fee (vocals/songwriting), John Vesey (accordion) and Ken Vesey (fiddle). Raised in a musical household shaped by Irish tradition and a New York upbringing, the group developed a sound that blends traditional Irish music with contemporary folk, rock, and pop influences. Their new single, Slán go Fóill, is a story-driven folk-pop song shaped by Irish history and modern migration, built around the Irish phrase meaning “goodbye for now.” Slán go Fóill explores the emotional space between leaving and returning, and is told from the perspective of those standing at the edge of home, carrying love, grief, pride, and hope all at the same time. Songwriter Kathleen Fee says of the song, “This song lives in that moment right before leaving, when love, fear, pride, and hope are all tangled together. It’s not about saying goodbye forever. It’s about trusting that a piece of you carries on.”
It may be that when considering folk and how traditional music can progress into a continuing future relevancy, it was not shanties that you were thinking of. Well, it is what Toronto’s shantymen Pressgang Mutiny have on their minds. With the very recent release of their 3rd album, Departure, they have put their own spin on the traditional seaborne work songs, bringing in Hip-Hop production, elements of Dancehall and Ska, and historical samples. A step too far? Well, on Departure, the band have also brought in additional collaborators, with guest appearances from artists including Carl Harvey of Toots and the Maytals, Toronto Reggae veteran Sunray Grennan, world beat juggling champion DJ Jasper Gahunia, and Toronto Hip-Hop artist Matt Somber. It’s an approach that reflects the group’s belief that shanties, at their core, have always been a doorway for cross-cultural musical exchange. These contributions do not dilute the tradition but reinforce its adaptability and continued relevance.
Pressgang Mutiny are Richard Kott, James McKie, Michael O’Grady, and Stefan Read, alongside DJ Chaotic Vibrance.
Also marking a third album, Emily Scott Robinson is in glorious voice on the folk-americana of Appalachia, which is the album’s title track. It’s actually her fifth release, but her third on Oh Boy Records, and also has the benefit of a Josh Kaufman production credit. On Appalachia, Robinson pays tribute to her home state of North Carolina and the Blue Ridge Mountains that, for a few years, she called home. Duncan Wickel, from Western North Carolina, adds his fiddle to this song.
Back to the future of folk, and a voice we’ve featured before is Frankie Archer, who has just announced that her debut album, The Dance of Death, will be out June 5th via Purr of the Bear. Her take on The Unquiet Grave mixes together a traditional sound with crackling electronics, and this is the approach to the album – it was co-produced with Guy Massey (Kylie Minogue, Spiritualized, Richard Hawley), and sees Archer showing influences such as Little Dragon, Hannah Peel, Rosalía, Björk and Bat for Lashes. It’s new old folk, and it’s worth hearing.
If there is one thing better than a folk artist or band, it is a Folk Collective – such as Brown Wimpenny, who took their name from a distant 19th-century relative of tenor banjoist Seth Lockwood’s. Brown Wimpenny began with informal get-together Sunday jam sessions in Lockwood’s Manchester living room, early gigs saw the band take up half the capacity of the room they were playing in. The collective grew as large as 25 members before being whittled down (sounds painful) to its current number of 11. Be that as it may, they return with another new single, Raglan Road, of which they (collectively) say: “The song never fails to make somebody cry and is regarded as one of the finest, most complex love songs in Irish folk music. It’s a tough song for a young band to tackle, but we wanted to do a version of it because of the mad, experimental, Joycean lyrics. First penned by Patrick Kavanagh in the 1940s and put to the truly ancient tune ‘The Dawning of the Day’ by Luke Kelly (whose version remains unsurpassed). It’s really a tragic song about loneliness, an existential sort of heartbreak that we think speaks well to the loneliness of our generation, where love is sometimes seen as a painful risk ~ futile, bound to disaster and best avoided. But it’s also about joy, memory, and the wonder of being in love”
Sequoia‘s So Long is another song that straddles the folk and americana boundaries. It’s the title song of the Portland musicians’ new album, which is out on June 26th. The story behind the song is somewhat on the serious side, so we’ll let Sequoia tell it for himself: “I grew up without a permanent father figure. In the last 15 years, the patriarch of my family was my brothers’ and sisters’ dad. I spent my first days with his last name and had known him since I was a child. He was always a parent to me. He was a tattoo artist from Webster, Massachusetts, a biker who prolifically painted. He was rough, but his spirit was uncontainable. He was a wanderer, my mother spent the first years of my siblings’ lives living out of a van, traveling the country, following a guru. He was a seeker of truth, as brutal and honest as I know New England to be. He was riddled with drug and alcohol addiction, and after 20 years of sobriety, died of a fentanyl overdose in 2022.
I don’t think I’ll ever get over the grief or his brilliance. I remember my brother, defeated, saying, “Can you believe we’ll never see Pops again?” This is a song about losing him, the sudden permanence of death, written in lieu of the biography everyone deserves. I feel fortunate to have been close with him and to see so much of his memory in who I am. I named the album after the song dedicated to him.”
And that’s it for another month, except of course for the parting gift of the Classic Folk Track. This has been chosen for no better reason than because the latest incarnation of this band – Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle – popped up in today’s emails advertising future gigs. They will be playing at EartH on September 3rd, supported by Junior Brother and Sam Grassie. Should be a great night. So, in recognition of that, here’s the original Pentangle, appearing on a BBC show in 1968. Ah, what a song.
