8 Great Folk Albums from Fall 2025

Welcome back to For the Sake of the Song, our periodic survey of the best new releases in folk. This seasonal roundup continues my quest to cover as wide a spectrum as possible under the banner of folk, which includes everything from ambient Americana to plunderphonic folklore projects, lush chamber folk arrangements and psychedelic folk ragas. Open your mind and enjoy the best folk albums of fall 2025.

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Blue Lake – The Animal

Copenhagen-based Texas native Jason Dungan left an unlikely hefty impression with his breezy, gentle Blue Lake project back in 2023 on Sun Arcs, a gorgeous album of instrumentals guided by his zither playing. Its follow-up, the newly released The Animal, is cut from a similar cloth, its serene chamber-folk built from small ensemble acoustic arrangements featuring pump organ and clarinet, sometimes rising into a glorious climax in standout moments like “Strand.” But much of the time this music is beautifully weightless, meditative and suggestive rather than prescriptive. Given this column’s liberal reading of what folk is (and I wouldn’t have it any other way!), I could easily see this fitting into our ambient column or even the alt-country roundup we recently launched, but genre is a small matter in the context of the sublime feeling it conjures.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Caged Animals – Make Strange Friends

Caged Animals’ Vincent Cacchione once fronted the Brooklyn indie pop group Soft Black, which also featured Zachary Cole Smith, later of DIIV. But Cacchione has since relocated to New Brunswick, focusing on his Caged Animals project over the past 15 years, which has an ample discography up on Bandcamp and a splendid new standout album in Make Strange Friends. Beautifully understated, it’s an album that rewards closer listening on highlights such as “Alligator,” where guitar, piano and what sounds like an accordion converge in a subtly lush series of layers. While one of Caged Animals’ Bandcamp tags is “anti-folk,” there’s nothing so discordant or far-out about what Cacchione does here; Make Strange Friends is a warm and inviting album, tailor-made for chilly fall afternoons and close listening on a good pair of headphones.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Hannah Frances – Nested in Tangles

Hannah Frances quickly became one of my favorite contemporary singer/songwriters with last year’s Keeper of the Shepherd, a lush and deeply moving album that I included on my list of 2024’s best folk. A little over a year after that album’s release, Frances delivers yet another wonderful new record that pairs a journey of emotional healing with some lush, beautiful arrangements rife with horns and intricate songwriting that has grown increasingly more progressive. Frances indulges in a pair of instrumentals on Nested in Tangles, as well as some spoken word material that features some of the album’s most intricate and rich melodic material. Though Nested continues along the path that Frances embarked on with Shepherd, it opens up an even wider spectrum of possibilities, colors and textures. Just wonderful.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)

Old Saw – The Wringing Cloth

The latest release from the New England cult ambient Americana group Old Saw is supposedly their last, closing out a brief but fruitful legacy of Bandcamp releases that have quickly built up an enthusiastic online following. And it’s easy to see why: The Wringing Cloth is breathtaking, a gorgeously arranged and performed set of haunting ballads that pair drone with Appalachian folk instruments and a sense of post-rock-like cinematic wonder. Through relatively stark means they evoke big things: sprawling landscapes, haunted locales, stark and bitter winters—and of course hundreds of years of American musical history. If this is indeed the last chapter, it’s a splendid one, the pinnacle of a project founded on old traditions and unseen paths.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Prewn – System

Singer/songwriter Izzy Hagerup, who records and performs as Prewn, employs a fairly conventional setup of guitar and voice, occasionally incorporating a drum loop into her ragged dirges or an eerie streak of violin, like the one that colors “Easy,” the leadoff track on her new album System. But I’m hesitant to call System “conventional” by any means, its songs prone to slowly changing shape and slipping in and out of any comfortable stylistic territory, be it the infectious slacker rock of “Commotion,” the evolving, climactic chamber-folk of the title track, the woozy psychedelic strums of “It’s Only You” or the pitch-black waltz of “My Side.” There’s always something new to reveal, some element yet to unveil, which makes System the kind of album worth repeat listens—best to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like the Sky

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a multidisciplinary artist—singer, songwriter, poet, activist—whose work all overlaps in some form or another. The indigenous artist previewed the release of her new album Live Like the Sky with a video for leadoff track “White Kites and Sky Blue,” a gorgeously lush meeting of folk-rock and dream pop, released for Canada’s National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. Juxtaposing natural imagery with those of destruction, war and resistance, it’s a powerful statement “naming and narrating our shared present—one of live streamed genocide, climate collapse and fascism,” as she put it. But then again so is all of Live Like the Sky, which is at once soothing and defiant, pairing gorgeous arrangements that draw from new wave, post-punk, folk and dream pop as Simpson’s sung and spoken lyrics—including “Minode’e,” in an Alderville First Nation dialect—draw from her surroundings and the wisdom of Elders as well as taking aim at destructive colonialist powers. There’s a lot to digest here, but it’s all presented via some of the most accessible and melodic material to date from the previously Polaris Prize-nominated artist, which only serves to draw us in closer to the truth.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Sir Richard Bishop – Hillbilly Ragas

Former Sun City Girl and prolific guitarist Sir Richard Bishop has a back catalog that can be overwhelming, if not outright intimidating, to newcomers. Depending on how you sort it, he’s released something in the order of two to three dozen releases as a solo artist, not counting live records and splits, but after more than four records of making music, his newest is as good a place to start as any. Hillbilly Ragas is stripped down but by no means straightforward, a solo guitar record that does what its title promises, pairing rustic solo folk arrangements with open-tuned raga drones. It’s at times elegantly tense (“Buzzard’s Curse”), stark yet climactic (“Raw Eggs and Rooster Juice”), and frequently conjuring psychedelic fire (“They Shall Take Up Serpents,” “Cuttin’ the Shine”). It’s mystical material for which Bishop has long been known as a master, and a reminder of just what kind of sorcery he’s able to wield all by his lonesome.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

U – Archenfield

In the first installment of this column, I said I would be embracing a fluid definition of folk, and that I didn’t see it getting any narrower from here. Well, here’s proof enough of that: Archenfield, the sublimely strange new offering from UK plunderphonic hauntologist U. Its title is taken from a town in England’s West Midlands, and all of its source material—including clips from film, TV, YouTube and found recordings—is connected to the locale in some way or another. It’s as much sonic patchwork as it is a deep dive into a region’s folklore, which is more often than not a particularly eerie one; “The Bitter Withy” features a somewhat blasphemous folk song involving murdered children, “Avenbury Organist” seems to channel the spirit that haunts an old church, and “He’s Found It” features someone describing and replaying a recording of what it would appear is a ghost saying the title phrase. U’s methodology here reminds me of Matmos’ time-warp folklorics on 2003’s The Civil War filtered through the uncanny loops of The Caretaker. It’s a strange, creepy, and endlessly fascinating set of sounds.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

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