The Predatory Wasp
Reflective country-esque indie-folk from Clara Mann whose debut album Rift is out March 7 via state51. Ideal for sub-zero mornings in January when the year head looks both invigoratingly full of potential and impossibly exhausting.
Trying to get back into regular new music posts, but it’s very challenging with all these best of lists taking up my time. It’s exhausting! Sometimes I need to reminder myself that’s not actually a job and it’s supposed to be fun. Which it mostly is, but not always. Anyway – here’s a jaunty, heartwarming collab between Baba Stiltz and Okay Kaya – released on Christmas Day no less!
Loma’s 2020 album Don’t Shy Away was one of the best of the year: its somewhat paranoid but ultimately reassuringly intimacy the perfect companion for heading into a winter of lockdown bleakness. Four years later we now have the follow up How Will I Live Without A Body, and while the overall atmosphere hasn’t changed drastically – recording techniques include using the ruin of a 12th-century chapel as a reverb chamber – I’m not sure it quite reaches the insular beauty of it’s predecessor. How It Starts is lovely though.
It’s hard to explain just how of an emotional connection I have to Sufjan Steven’s 2024 album Seven Swans. Reissued today for its 20th anniversary, it was the first album I listened to, and I vividly remember the experience. It was like nothing I’d heard before, and started an intense and continuing obsession. Sister is probably the album’s emotional peak, with closer The Transfiguration coming in a close second. But the entire album is flawless. I have still never heard anything that approaches its raw emotion and stripped down beauty. I love you, Sufjan.
Lots of good stuff out today, much of it pretty mournful (see also: most of Bat For Lashes’ new album) but this is my pick, from Arooj Aftab’s new album Night Reign which described in the press notes as “a perfumed, public garden of renewal”, and although I’m not entirely sure what that means, it’s very lovely.
The first new music since the release of her excellent 2023 album Spike Field, Taper was written and recorded around two years ago, and is “about searching for someone who doesn’t want to be found and mourning a future foreclosed. grief and longing, basically…”. Bleak! And beautiful!
Nina Kinert released RELIGIOUS last year; an album telling personal stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden. Her new LP CHORALS is a continuation of RELIGIOUS and is billed as “an experiment revolving around voice and death” recorded in close collaboration with Anton Sundell and Daniel Fagge Fagerström. It’s beautiful, and if you’re interested in hearing more about Nina’s experiences and the recording progress, be sure to check my interview with her from last year.
There have already been some banging albums out this year, Naliah Hunter’s Lovegaze not least among them. Depending on which publications you trust this has been labelled as ambient, experimental, folk or a combination of all these and more. If you trust this blog, I’d just say go and listen to it and make your own mind up (but it’s definitely not ambient).
Avi. C Engel’s new album Too Many Souls lands 23 February digitally, with additional formats including cassette by Cruel Nature Records (UK) and on CD by Somnimage (US). Lead single Hold This Flame is a spectral delight; sparse and haunting with Engel’s ghostly vocal contrasting with the gently rising dissonance of strings and percussion.
Hailing from Cornwall – namely Mousehole, which is what most people imagine when picturing a Cornish finishing village – Daisy Rickman is an artist, photographer and folk musician whose second album Howl is due out in March. Feed The Forest is the album’s lead single, a song that perfectly blends discordance with melody, and warmth with a creeping sense of dread, with Rickman’s confident, earthy vocals as haunting as they are reassuring.
The Predatory Wasp 