AUK’s EP Round-Up – September 2025

Welcome to September’s edition of the Monthly EPs Round-Up, where we run a sagacious eye over the current crop of new releases. This time round, we’re slightly lighter on numbers than in previous months, but there is still plenty of tasty new songs to get our teeth into. So, without further distraction, let’s discover what September has to offer and which of these new releases has won the much-coveted prize of EP of the month. Read on, and all will be revealed.

We begin this month with something rather special as Thomas Dollbaum releases his first new material in over three years. This new six-track EP entitled “Drive All Night” is the follow-up to Dollbaum’s much lauded debut album “Wellswood” that first saw the light of day in 2022, receiving a much-deserved 9/10 from these pages, being described as an “impressive and arresting debut”. These new tracks were recorded in Mississippi throughout 2023 under the watchful eyes of Clay Jones with a cast of some of Nashville’s finest supporting musicians, including Kate Teague, whose vocal contribution to Dollbaum’s debut release added a touch of sweetness to the spice. Originally from the Tampa area, but more recently based in New Orleans, where he earned an MFA in Poetry, Dollbaum supports his musical career as a qualified carpenter and construction worker, and it is from this blue-collar world that many of the characters that inhabit his narrative-laden songs exist. As with his debut offering, this EP offers a collection of songs full of veiled tension, where the lost and the lonely skulk in the shadowy corners of the street with the dreamers and the losers. His pristine narratives are full of graphic imagery that encompasses a first-person, lived-in experience. Every song here is a winner, from the atmospheric title track that opens proceedings with its gently picked acoustic guitar accompaniment, through to the melancholy ambience of ‘William Duffy’s Farm’. Personal favourite is probably ‘Warlock’s House’, with its lush arrangement, along with more delightful vocals from Teague that underscore some excellent storytelling from Dollbaum. His debut album was described as “one of the essential albums of (its) year”, and with “Drive All Night”, Dollbaum has delivered an EP worthy of similar plaudits, and ahead of a new full-length album slated for 2026, it comes highly recommended.

Next up, we have Jo Bartlett & Neil Haydock and their four-track EP entitled “The River Or The Road”. Bartlett’s name may well be a familiar name to many, having been involved in varying facets of the music industry since the mid-80s, including press officer for the independent label ‘Ultimate Records’ during the first half of the 1990s. She has released records in many guises over the years on various labels, signing with R.C.A. in 2000 as ‘It’s Jo and Danny’ with Danny Hagen. Around this time, they moved their base from London to Brecon in Wales, where they started up the Green Man Festival in 2003, while more recently they have started The Wake Festival in West Sussex. Bartlett first met Haydock while working as press officer for his band Submarine in the early 1990s, and the two reconnected when Haydock played guitar fo It’s Jo and Danny at their 2000 Glastonbury performance. More recently, they came together to play a gig this June, on the back of which the duo decided to record these four tracks, all written by Bartlett and Hagen, using the familiar folk tuning of DADGAD, so strongly associated with Davey Graham. All the songs here are a delight, using the natural folk idiom as a structure, before adding subtle touches of indie and sweet melodies within the arrangements to create something that feels both of its time and timeless. Particular favourites are the opening number ‘Frozen In Time’ with its sparse ambience of finger-picked acoustic guitar and deceptively faint accordion, and ‘Spanish Steps’ that offers a greater rhythmic pulse against some infectious harmonies. A beautiful EP that again comes highly recommended.

Electric Elm is a collaboration between singer-songwriter Chris Bousquet (aka American Elm) and multi-instrumentalist and producer Eric Richter, who has previously worked with such renowned artists as Earl Slick and Mercury Rev. Collectively, they have come together to release this new four-track EP “Blue Glass Collection”, which draws on their shared affection for folk, country, rock and pop. The two artists have been longtime friends, having grown up in adjacent Connecticut shoreline towns and released their debut single ‘A Long Road To Be Free’ back in 2018. Since then, four more singles have followed, prior to the release of their first EP. There’s a lot to like across these four songs, with plenty going on within the arrangements, which helps create a soundscape that never impedes the melody. The opening track, ‘Resounder’, is a prime example, where the minor chords of the piano act as a juxtaposition to the bright colours delivered by the Byrds-esque guitar fills. while the upper-register notes from the keys on ‘Float Like A River’ help capture the fragility within Bousquet’s narrative. The EPs highlight is possibly the closing number ‘Let Us Begin’, where the intensity of Bousquet’s vocals is underpinned by some stunning pedal steel. This is a highly enjoyable listen that continues to reveal its layers on repeated listens.

Originally from Scotland but now based in Norwich, UK, Ross Stewart is one of the young, new singer-songwriters currently making a name for themselves across these shores. His debut five-track EP is entitled “Purpose“, which draws on a fusion of blues rock mixed with a modicum of folk and americana sensibilities. Stewart has been paying his dues, gaining experience as a pub singer and session guitarist whilst attending university, supplementing his income with a myriad of different jobs, including bartender. Having performed his first headline gig earlier this year, he has gradually built a healthy catalogue of released music, garnering successful airplay on numerous radio stations, including earning ‘Track Of The Week’ with BBC Introducing. Of the five songs available here, four have already been released as singles, with the opening number, ‘Fall From Grace’, immediately setting the tone, as blues rock riffs puncture a large, glossy production, while Stewart demonstrates his vocal prowess. There are a couple of songs that ease off the gas a little with the predominantly acoustic arrangement of ‘Tangerine Sky’, imbuing a folk ambience that finds Stewart singing within himself and thus sounding more expressive, which suits the emotive narrative. Elsewhere, ‘Lands End’ exposes slightly more commercial leanings, while the soft rock for ‘Sweet Morning’ lacks any real sense of identity. The EP closes with ‘Stones Don’t Bleed’, which one feels probably represents Stewart’s preferred musical path, with its gritty, full-on rock riffs, blistering pentatonic guitar solos with lashings of sustain and the obligatory feedback. Within that context, it is very good, and it would come as no surprise if, in the not-so-distant future, Stewart was packing out Arenas around the world, though when it comes to airplay, his songs are far more likely to be played on ‘Planet Rock’ than ‘Black Deer Radio’, for in truth, the overall sound here feels a long way from americana.

The Prickly Pair are a Nashville-based duo consisting of Mason Summit and Irene Greene. The duo originally teamed up for a class assignment while they were both students at USC/Thornton School of Music, and then, after becoming a couple, chose to pursue separate musical careers. The constrictions caused by the pandemic saw the couple returning to work as a duo, before eventually making the big jump, moving from LA to Nashville. Their debut, self-titled, five-track EP opens with ‘Winsome Lose Some Game’ that highlights their tight, close harmonies throughout a song that leans heavily towards classic country and western, underpinned by its ‘clip-clop’ percussive beat. The following song, ‘Swamp Angel’, offers up more of an edge with Greene’s lead vocals fully connecting with the powerful narrative. Summit takes the lead on the third number, ‘Riverside’, a reflective, subtly atmospheric song with a gorgeous chorus where the duo’s harmonies once again excel. The twang of an electric guitar opens ‘Never Any Good’, where the propulsive beat carries the song along at a pace, before Greene takes the lead on the dreamy closing number ‘Piece Of The Sky’. There’s a lot to like on this debut release, with The Prickly Pair inhabiting a similar musical soundscape to the Civil Wars, with intelligent, edgy lyrics combining with sweet harmonies and infectious melodies, which should help propel the duo to the next stage of their career.

So, that only leaves the winner of September’s ‘Monthly EP Round-Up’, and again it has been a close call, with the EP that opened this feature coming a close second. However, this month the award goes to Roberta Smith and her new four-track EP “Airs On A Sixstring”. Originally from Leeds, UK, Smith started writing songs at just fifteen and within a year rose to almost immediate success, winning a major talent competition, performing in the winner’s concert at Leeds Town Hall in front of four thousand people, which eventually led to a recording contract and a tour supporting Ralph McTell. A self-confessed flower child, Smith’s musical career could be described to date as unrealised potential, with greater priorities, such as University, marriage, and four children to raise, proving a most understandable and acceptable distraction. However, her passion for writing music has never waned, and now, living in London, she has finally returned to recording. Describing herself as a “boho singer-guitarist“, her roots remain very much in the singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s. The clarity of her voice remains, just now imbued with a sagacious richness, while her intricate finger-style guitar playing, embedded in the folk tradition, utilises jazz chords and phrasing to help deliver an unconventional musical format that offers the perfect conduit to her unique lyrical narratives of love in all its guises. The EP opens with the stunning ‘I Am Alone’, which exists in a similar rarified space once occupied by the likes of Annie Hallam and Vashti Bunyan that feels as if it could have been written anytime in the last fifty years. The quality never drops as firstly ‘Old Clothes’, followed by ‘Howling At The Moon’, and finally ‘The Lost Song’ herald gorgeous folk songs with a modern twist, where the sweetest melodies continuously surprise against irregular chord changes, all wrapped around a lyricism that evokes loneliness, inertia in the face of climate change, the touching beauty of a long-standing love and tragic comedy. With this wonderful collection of songs that make up “Airs On A Sixstring”, one gets the feeling that Roberta Smith’s time has finally arrived.