The 20 Best Folk Albums of 2024

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best folk albums of 2024

We’ve revealed our favorite albums of the year, along with our favorite songs, plus the best in metaljazzhip-hopexperimental and reissues. And we’re continuing our coverage of the best music of 2024 with deeper dives.

Today we offer up another first: the best folk albums of 2024. Folk is arguably one of the most complicated styles of music to attempt to try to evaluate, as much a sound as an intangible ethos. Folk music can be a singer/songwriter with an acoustic guitar, it can be novel interpretations of ages-old traditions, or it can be something else entirely. As Louis Armstrong once put it: “all music is folk music—I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.” In that spirit, this inaugural best folk albums list comprises everything from hushed acoustic songs about personal struggles to eclectic records that intertwine jazz, poetry and ambient ballads. They’re influenced by American primitivism and Brazilian pop, made with traditional instruments or cut and pasted from archival source material.

Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.


Arooj Aftab Night Reign review
Verve

Arooj Aftab – Night Reign

Arooj Aftab’s Night Reign blurs the space between jazz and folk, her fluid approach combining everything from classic standards (“Autumn Leaves”) to Urdu poetry, centuries-old musical traditions and contemporary guest artists such as frequent collaborator Vijay Iyer and prolific poet/rapper/artist Moor Mother. Aftab intertwines and redefines traditional musical elements by placing them in new contexts with new arrangements, all of them beautiful and steeped in a nocturnal mood. Yet as Aftab showcases throughout, that darkly enchanting mood can encapsulate everything from the sensual to the melancholy, to the defiant, as with her collaboration with Moor Mother, “Bolo Na.” Night Reign sounds incredible at any and all times, but after the sun goes down, it truly comes alive.

Listen/Buy:


best folk albums of 2024 - Cristobal Avendano and Silvia Moreno
Self-released

Cristóbal Avendaño and Silvia Moreno – Lancé esto al otro lado del mar

The debut release from Chilean duo Cristobal Avendano and Silvia Moreno is, simply, breathtaking. Composed of meditative, progressive folk pieces that bring to mind avant-folk pioneers like Third Eye Band, the 10 pieces here are atmospheric and otherworldly, more like natural forces than composed pieces. The duo juxtapose Spanish-spoken poetry against their layered acoustic performances, which range from intricate finger-picked plucks to open-tuning drones, sometimes dark but rarely stormy, the subtle details taking on almost an ASMR quality in a good pair of headphones. Just gorgeous. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Smithsonian Folkways

Jake Blount & Mali Obamsawin – symbiont

The full-length collaboration between Jake Blount and Mali Obamsawin opens with the sound of a news anchor reading a report of the devastating floods in Pakistan in 2022, a dire warning that transitions into the intense and soulful “What’s You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire?”. The message is clear: The fire’s already burning. The duo draw from Black and Indigenous folk songs, enhanced with electronic pulses or blazing licks of electronic guitar, creating a gospel album that employs music from centuries past as a call to action for being able to survive the ongoing threat of climate change together. As compelling as it is on a conceptual level, the songs on symbiont are spectacular reinterpretations of their source material, whether the ambient bluegrass of “Come Down Ancients,” the clattering electronics of “My Way’s Cloudy,” or the bluesy “Mother.” 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Centripetal Force

Kevin Coleman – Imaginary Conversations

I love hearing Kevin Coleman play guitar. It’s essentially that simple, but Imaginary Conversations, his 2024 full-length, is anything but. Across three progressively lengthier songs, the Virginia artist undergoes a transformation from a more bluegrass-informed American primitivist style on “Mammut Americanum” to a cosmic space-folk sojourn on the nearly 20-minute “Imaginary Conversations on Fish Hatchery Rd.”, whose machine-drum pulse and looping arpeggios bring to mind the solitary kosmische of an artist like Mark McGuire. Coleman is rooted in American folk music yet intent on bringing it into the future, all of which is very exciting. And yet, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t here mostly for his mesmerizing open-tuning guitar playing—deft, intricate, and cosmic.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best folk albums of 2024 - Liana Flores
Verve

Liana Flores – Flower of the Soul

From an artist’s perspective, it’s probably not always the greatest compliment to be told that your music is “soothing.” It implies a kind of passiveness on the part of the listener, the ignorability of ambient overcoming the part that’s interesting. But I mean this as no faint praise when I describe Liana Flores’ Flower of the Soul as a deeply soothing album. The British singer/songwriter of Brazilian heritage draws heavily from bossa nova and English folk alike on her debut full-length, featuring collaborators such as Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear and Brazilian singer/songwriter Tim Bernardes on a set of songs that draws connections between Jobim and Nick Drake. She’s not the only artist to do so, in fact she’s not the only artist on this list who does—Jessica Pratt’s turn toward bossa nova has been a wonderful surprise. But Flores’ gentle and graceful compositions contain additional flourishes that make it all the more nourishing and comforting, from brushed drums to piano, celesta and flute. That this album was released on Verve, once the home of Astrud Gilberto, seems only fitting—an album that sounds like it was made to be played on cozy nights in front of the fireplace.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)


Hannah Frances - Keeper of the Shepherd
Ruination

Hannah Frances – Keeper of the Shepherd

The seven songs on Hannah Frances’ third album range from hushed, intimate ballads to dazzlingly elaborate showpieces—so it only makes sense that her music has been compared to both Jeff Buckley and fusion-era Joni Mitchell. She’s neither as histrionic as Buckley nor as steeped in avant garde jazz as Joni, but the comparisons make sense on Keeper of the Shepherd, a record that feels endlessly rich, even in its quieter moments like the sensory euphoria in the rattle of downtuned strings in her fingerpicked progression on “Floodplain” or the gentle plucks and layered harmonies of “Husk.” But at its biggest and most climactic, like driving opener “Bronwyn” or the soaring and woodwind-laden “Vacant Intimacies,” she offers songwriting with a thrilling sense of enormity. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


12XU

Gerycz/Powers/Rolin – Activator

Cloud Nothings’ powerhouse drummer Jayson Gerycz has, for the past half-decade, been part of a genre-blurring trio with Jen Powers and Matthew Rolin, whose sound is something like roots music defying gravity. Their third album, Activator, resonates with taps of dulcimer and bright American primitivist-inspired guitar plucks, and it also achieves a stormy intensity typically heard in post-rock at its most climactic. In fact, on the title track, the group most closely resembles the fluid beauty and elegant chaos of Dirty Three, albeit filtered through ambient Americana. Whereas on “Ivory” the group blurs the line between soothing and tempestuous via an aqueous ebb and flow of string plucks, as if to replicate the sound of wind intermittently blowing rain against a windowpane. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best folk albums of 2024 - Gordan
Glitterbeat

Gordan – Gordan

I’m tempted to call Gordan’s self-titled album the strangest record on this list, but it’s certainly in peculiar company. (I mean that with all due praise—the curiouser the better.) A collaboration between Svetlana Spajic—researcher, teacher and performer of traditional Balkan music—drummer Andi Stecher and Guido Möbius, Gordan’s debut pairs regional folk songs with eerie, minimalist, cacophonous menace. The rhythm section provides an abrasive backing, rife with krautrock pulses and flecked with dissonance, while Spajic guides each piece with a mix of haunting melodic vocal performances and spoken-word storytelling, the seemingly incongruous elements of the album merging in revelatory ways though rarely mellifluous ones. It’s an intense and uneasy listen at times, tense and menacing, recontextualizing the regional folk song as a physical force of nature. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best folk albums of 2024 - Danny Paul Grody Duo
Three Lobed

Danny Paul Grody Duo – Arc of Night

In 2023, guitarist Danny Paul Grody released a gorgeous album of American primitivist guitar music—enhanced with ambient drones and the spaciousness of post-rock—titled Arc of Day. This year, he followed it up with a companion release, the richer, full-band(ish) arrangements of Arc of Night, featuring drums from Rich Douthit—hence the “duo”—and occasional bass from Trevor Montgomery, naturally titled Arc of Night. As the nocturnal counterpart to its predecessor, it’s a wondrous look toward shooting stars and constellations, a sky full of majesty and awe given sometimes starkly intimate and occasionally lushly expansive soundtracks, most stunningly encapsulated on the lengthy standout “Coyote Valley at Dusk.”

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)


best folk albums of 2024 - Haley Heynderickx
Mama Bird

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

The acoustic guitar-playing singer/songwriter will forever be plagued by descriptions like “pastoral,” but visions of the natural world are aspirational things on the third album by Portland’s Haley Heynderickx. The gentle beauty in her songs seems to evoke a slower pace of life, a kind of spiritual centeredness; her lyrics suggest much the opposite, as she navigates a world that stacks anxiety triggers high: poor eating habits, overscheduling yourself, locking your keys in your car and so on. But in the album’s most sublime moments, she often finds herself drawn to the lure where you can’t hear a car alarm or a cell phone ping. “Man, I’d do anything to hear the redwoods talk,” she sings on “Redwoods (Anxious God)”, a yearning that’s relatable, however distant a possibility that might be.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)


Sublime Frequencies

The Handover – The Handover

The three members of The Handover—oud player Aly Eissa, keyboardist Jonas Cambien and violinist Ayman Asfour—have each recorded solo and collaborative records outside of the group’s sole release. This album is a live performance of a lengthy two-part composition from Eissa rooted in traditional Egyptian folk music but ascending to exploratory and progressive space. It’s a mesmerizing and psychedelic journey that extends over two 25-minute halves, at times trancelike in its droning repetitions, elsewhere achieving the intensity of ‘60s-era avant garde jazz, and rarely if ever coming back down to earth once it achieves levitation. An awe-inspiring release that shows just how thrilling instrumental, acoustic music can be. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best folk albums of 2024 - Laura Marling
Partisan

Laura Marling – Patterns In Repeat

Singer/songwriter Laura Marling has a discography full of excellent releases, to the degree that there’s an argument to be made for just about any of them as her best (my vote’s for Once I Was An Eagle, but it has some fierce competition). That said, if consensus started to form around her latest, Patterns in Repeat—and by all indications it is—it’d be well deserved. Gentle and quiet, sans percussion and kissed by string arrangements, Patterns in Repeat is an album informed by home and family, from its reflections on motherhood to its inclusion of a song written by Marling’s father. These songs have a casual warmth to them, not tossed off but not feeling fussed-over either, even when given a symphonic backing. That’s a hard thing to pull off, but Marling makes it all sound casual and effortless, even when it’s this meticulously crafted.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)


best folk albums of 2024 - Daudi Matsiko

Daudi Matsiko – The King of Misery

Even on a list of records defined by their relative lack of amplification, Daudi Matsiko’s The King of Misery is a remarkably hushed and gentle set of songs. An album written about the British singer/songwriter’s own experiences with depression and bipolar affective disorder, it’s an unflinching and honest record, but he delivers these messages of pain and struggle through the softest of melodies. His arrangements are stark, typically comprising subtle plucks of guitar and his slightly-above-a-whisper vocals, but a little layering often goes a long way, like the addition of saxophone on “Fool Me As Many Times As You Like” or the radiant heat of synthesizer on “I Need You to Stop Calling My Phone.” But this is an intimate album by design, an honest and frequently heartbreaking message as if shared by a close friend late at night—a soothing source of comfort from one person who’s been there to whoever might need it.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best folk albums of 2024 - Milkweed
Self-released

Milkweed – Folklore 1979

Plunderfolk? Folklorephonics? It’s an open question as to what name to give a sound as singular and strange as UK duo Milkweed’s, but it’s quite incredible even in its peculiarity. Their M.O. is by sourcing material and subject matter from academic folklore journals, as they’ve done with Folklore 1979, each of its nine brief pieces based around a 1979 edition of the Folklore Society’s FOLKLORE journal. So what results is sampladelic reconstructions of public domain songs employing sounds both thematically appropriate—pipes, banjos and zithers—or not, like a hip-hop break. The mysterious duo are studied and meticulous with their source material, but the finished result is iconoclastic and irreverent in the best way.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Jessica Pratt Here in the Pitch review
Mexican Summer

Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch

It stands to reason that the first new album from singer/songwriter Jessica Pratt after a five-year interval would end up being her most gorgeously lush album to date, but it’s still far subtler and more restrained in its escalation of sonic treatments than you might think. Pratt is at once a perfectionist and a minimalist, drawing stunning beauty from even the most hushed and stark acoustic arrangements. Those can be found in ample supply on Here in the Pitch, sometimes paired with the eerie drone of organ (“Nowhere It Was”) or in the form of a breezy bossa nova (“By Hook or By Crook”). But amid these quiet meditations are gloriously maximalist chamber pop productions like the ’60s-era Scott Walker inspired “Life Is.” Here In the Pitch is a giant leap made in small steps, a glorious new high that still suggests even more room to soar.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)


Raphael Rogiński – Žaltys

Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński has employed a wide range of inspirations as the source material for his recordings, including the musical works of English composer Henry Purcell and jazz great John Coltrane as well as the poetry of Langston Hughes—all of which often only loosely resembles its counterpart. With his latest, Žaltys, Rogiński dives deeper into the Polish and Lithuanian folk songs that he first heard as a child, and the impression they left upon him during those youthful summers. The stark, reverb-laden plucks of his guitar evoke natural landscapes, sometimes flourishing with greenery and at other times reflecting misty hilltops, invariably breathtaking in their gentle and intricate beauty. Though the album largely comprises solo performances (which can turn at times abrasive and jagged, as on “Raudonoji Gegūnė”), he’s joined on a couple occasions by Indrė Jurgelevičiūte of Merope, whose vocal contribution to “Šilinis Viržis” elevates an already miraculous sound from stark mysticism to psychedelic wonder. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance Jinxed by Being review
Drag City

Six Organs of Admittance and Shackleton – Jinxed by Being

Ben Chasny released two albums under the mantle of Six Organs of Admittance this year. One, Time Is Glass, saw the singer/songwriter return to a stripped-down, all-acoustic sound that’s characterized some of his most acclaimed recordings. The other was Jinxed By Being, a full-length collaboration with producer Shackleton that fleshed out Chasny’s folk ragas into extended acts of hypnosis with even richer arrangements and denser sonic effects, capturing a spiritual and otherworldly vibe in their hallucinogenic partnership. Moments like the juxtaposition of bell tones against guitar plucks and eventual eruptions of distorted riffs in “Electrical Storm” reveal the heights of this collaborative effort, achieving out-of-body weirdness through psych-goth drone. 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon(vinyl)


Night School

Tristwch Y Fenywod – Tristwch Y Fenywod

Leeds trio Tristwch Y Fenywod are a singular group, constructing a unique take on darkwave using zither as its main instrument. Their spectral fusion is something like early Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance filtered through pre-rock instrumentation but with the eerie mood and taut songwriting intact. You could call it witchfolk, perhaps—I kind of like “forest goth,” myself—as the trio’s self-titled debut invokes Druidic imagery and folktales through a queer, anti-fascist/anti-colonial lens, with lyrics sung in the Welsh language. It’s a fantastic and fascinating meeting of the modern and the medieval, one of the most exciting releases I’ve heard in any genre this year.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Woodland review
Acony

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings – Woodland

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ first co-credited album of original songs arrives 13 years after Welch’s last solo album, The Harrow and the Harvest—which, for all intents and purposes, was in fact a Welch and Rawlings album as well, the duo having worked together since the 1990s. The wait was worth it, as it always is, but also necessary, Welch and Rawlings having undergone a period of rebuilding after their studio was hit by tornados in 2020. Woodland is named for that studio, its songs reflecting both images of apocalypse and appreciation for what remains, while it finds the two troubadours offering some of the best songs of their career in the form of new spins on outlaw ballads (“Lawman”), baroque folk (“The Bells and the Birds”), and unusually warm-hearted endtimes narratives (“The Day the Mississippi Died”). Amid a world in chaos, Woodland provides a rare glimpse of perfect harmony.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Yasmin Williams Acadia review
Nonesuch

Yasmin Williams – Acadia

The remarkable thing about Yasmin Williams’ guitar playing is not just in the precision and intricacy of her technique, but in the versatility of it. On her third full-length release, Acadia, the Virginia native showcases a wide range of playing styles, from an upbeat strum to gentle arpeggios to a more frenzied fingerstyle approach. No matter how she takes to her instrument, it’s a mesmerizing sound to behold. She’s also in the company of a number of standout guests here, from fellow guitar virtuoso Kaki King to ambient jazz artist Rich Ruth, each one building on Williams’ stellar foundation. Whether through these imaginative collaborations or simply through the new paths of exploration throughout, Acadia is the strongest document of Yasmin Williams’ artistry yet.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)


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