In 2024 I put together Treble’s first year-end list of essential folk records, which eventually led to the launch of a quarterly folk column. But the essence of what I started a year ago remains intact, namely the idea that folk music takes all forms, many of them unconventional and unpredictable. It can take shape in the form of pop songs with traditional instruments or a plunderphonic excavation of a town’s history, and everything and anything in between. The best folk albums of 2025 cover a wide spread of sounds, both traditional and innovative, stark and maximalist, reverent and iconoclastic.
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Annahstasia – Tether
Tether, the debut album by Los Angeles singer/songwriter Annahstasia Enuke, is something of a rebirth. She began her career in music as a teenager, pushed into pop/R&B by handlers who clearly didn’t understand her talents. To hear her deeper, husky vocal tones at the outset of opener “Be Kind” is to hear a singular and distinctive voice. That voice is the driving force on Tether, an album that’s among the most bracingly gorgeous sets of music I’ve heard all year, and often when Annahstasia is performing solo. That being said, she’s in good company, with guests such as Obongjayar and aja monet joining her on “Slow” and “All Is. Will Be. As It Was.”, respectively, as well as full band and choral arrangements on breathtaking moments like “Villain.” (Also one of our favorite songs of the year.) Though it’s a hushed, intimate piece of work on the whole, Tether leaves a big impression.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Ichiko Aoba – Luminescent Creatures
It took a little longer for listeners and critics on this side of the Pacific to catch on to Ichiko Aoba’s gentle sorcery; she had already released seven albums by the time 2020’s Windswept Adan earned critical acclaim stateside and became a source of soothing and comfort during the Covid pandemic. I’ll confess to being one of those latecomers, but hey, better late than never, right? Especially when she continues to deliver captivating releases such as Luminescent Creatures. A gentle and magical album of understated, twinkling ballads and jazz-influenced pop gems, it harbors a singular beauty, consistently serene yet occasionally harboring a lush and cinematic standout like “Luciferene.” Luminescent Creatures feels like entering a strange and beautiful world with new discoveries around every bend.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
Laura Cannell – The Visible Light of Other Worlds
British composer and multi-instrumentalist Laura Cannell has been making music for over two decades, both in folk and in modern classical music, as a solo artist and as a member of Horses Brawl. The Visible Light of Other Worlds is stark and haunting, floating in the ether between folk and drone, its compositions performed on acoustic instruments but carrying an unearthly glow. A piece like the melancholy “Restless Oceans” seems to materialize in the manner of an apparition, its melodic figures wrapped in ellipses and revealing no more than they need to. Much of this music is breathtaking in its darkness, gentle yet unsettling all the same, but there’s a strange kind of magic in it as well. We’re only a couple weeks from the winter solstice—have this one ready when the longest night sets in.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Paco Cathcart – Down on Them
Singer/songwriter Paco Cathcart first started releasing music as The Cradle nearly a decade ago, earning acclaim for their intricate, gentle and soothing (in the best way) 2018 album Bag of Holding. And since then they’ve released another dozen records, the latest of which stands among the best music they’ve released to date. Down on Them is cut from a similar cloth as that early standout, its 12 tracks woven together by Cathcart’s gorgeous guitar playing and understated vocals. And that’s really all any of them need, but Cathcart’s compositions range from the lush to the skeletal, adorned only by a French horn on a moment like opener “Your Reflection” and swelling into a Grizzly Bear-like psych-pop dirge on “Oh, Joy.” It’s a thrill to hear Cathcart embrace a stormy maximalism, but moments like the romantic campfire waltz “Just Love You” are the ones that drive Down on Them‘s beating heart.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Richard Dawson – End of the Middle
British singer/songwriter Richard Dawson’s body of work is pretty diverse taken as a whole, whether via his fuzzed-out songs on 2019’s 2020 or through his collaborations with Finnish psych outfit Circle. End of the Middle is decidedly more low-key; it’s not an album that reveals itself immediately or opts for flash. Outside of some drums and occasional blares of clarinet, the album mostly comprises songs built around Dawson’s own gentle guitar plucks and softly weathered voice. It’s quiet, meditative, but rife with emotion, reaching its most affecting peaks in the longer, slowly unfolding standouts “Knot” and “Removing Van.” His wilder excursions into krautrock and psychedelia are thrilling, but Dawson’s ability to craft such gentle beauty from rustic, simple means is a singular talent.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
Hannah Frances – Nested in Tangles
Hannah Frances’ 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd wasn’t her debut but felt like a new beginning, its lush arrangements and intricate performances providing gorgeous vehicles for introspection and soul-searching. The seed planted with that record has flourished into an even more lively and verdant sound with Nested in Tangles, a similarly ambitious and versatile album whose branches reach out farther into prog-folk interludes, gently complex spoken word pieces and a uniformly gorgeous sound that draws inspiration from progressive rock and jazz. It’s at times a heavy listen, Frances unafraid to touch the tenderest nerves (“Blue herons flew over our house as it burned down/Anger lingering on in all that’s left of it has left and gone“; “The fear of everyone leaving/Keeps me leaving first“). But the landscape is never less than breathtaking. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Jim Ghedi – Wasteland
When I first heard “Sheaf and Feld,” the bombastic opener of the second side of Jim Ghedi’s Wasteland, I knew I wasn’t hearing a conventional folk album by any measure. The British artist’s background is in more traditional fingerstyle folk guitar, but his latest is amplified and cloaked in an apocalyptic pall—the likes of which occasionally explodes into an outright ripper. As its title indicates, Wasteland is a document of decay, be it personal or societal, casting an eye and an ear to the past as the horizon looks ever more forbidding. Wasteland is bold and uncompromising, faithful and iconoclastic in equal measure.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions – Cold Blows the Rain
Albums released within the first couple weeks of the year run the risk of falling by the wayside come December. But the latest album from Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions has stuck with me all year, in large part due to its haunting, gothic atmosphere. There’s a persistent series of drones that resonate through Cold Blows the Rain, turning each sparse and beautifully melancholy ballad into something more spectral. These are simple but endlessly rich songs, with a chill that you’ll never quite shake.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Milkweed – Remscéla
Last year, Milkweed’s Folklore 1979 made my list of the year’s best folk albums simultaneously out of ingenuity and a kind of haunted charm. The anonymous UK duo doesn’t play acoustic folk and the degree to which the music is performed versus sourced, sampled or manipulated is all left to our imagination, which in a sense is fitting for a pair of artists who reinterpret the archaic through modern means. Remscéla is their biggest and most ambitious production yet, building on the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge—or at least the first 20 pages of it, as their Bandcamp page states—with a series of tracks that recontextualize centuries of folk tradition through distorted sonic filters, dub-like psychedelic disorientation and looped beats. That Milkweed, themselves, have no personal connection to the source material is even more fascinating, fully committing to the project out of a curiosity that’s both reverent and iconoclastic alike.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Kathryn Mohr – Waiting Room
Some of the best moments on Kathryn Mohr’s Waiting Room are frantic and fraught, unpolished shards of scraggly anti-folk laced with toxic doses of distortion. Some of them are hushed, barely audible transmissions from the subconscious, barely remembered dreams and faint, disorienting lights beaming through the window at 3 a.m. Recorded in Iceland in solitude, Mohr’s set of lo-fi dirges reflects the island nation’s summer and winter simultaneously, times when the sun never fully rises or the darkness never entirely sets in, confusing internal clocks and sleep patterns even while surrounded by a beautiful stillness. Nothing’s ever fully settled on Waiting Room, a beautifully tense purgatory of elliptical thoughts and sleepwalking lullabies.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Moundabout – Goat Skull Table
The opening track of Moundabout’s Goat Skull Table is the kind of acid fried weirdness you might’ve expected to hear during the formative years of the British industrial scene in the early ’80s, evoking the eerie performance art rituals of Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound. It’s something of an occult ritual ceremony to ring in the mesmerizing psychedelic folk of this UK duo, whose hypnotic dirges are considerably more melodic and accessible than where this haunted piece of work begins. But the darkness never quite lets up on Goat Skull Table, and the trance never fully breaks, occasionally easing for a shorter, Six Organs of Admittance-like raga in miniature on “Am I Not.” But it’s on the closing suite of “Blood on My Blanket” and “Wagon,” each one longer than 10 minutes apiece, where Goat Skull Table truly soars.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
OSMIUM – OSMIUM
The debut release from OSMIUM—a collaboration between Oscar winner/composer/cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, emptyset’s James Ginzburg, sound designer Sam Slater and Indonesian vocalist Rully Shabara—is a visceral experience. The personnel involved in the album are all known for making dark, intense works as well as nuanced and hauntingly stunning music alike, and this is no exception, its eight pieces—all of which are titled “OSMIUM”—pairing an immersive sonic immensity with something more primal and primitive. It’s terrifying and beautiful, capturing what at times would probably best be described as acoustic noise, or perhaps a kind of trance-inducing industrial music. I, for one, am mesmerized.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Hayden Pedigo – I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away
There’s a part of me (the mischievous part, I suppose) that wanted to include Hayden Pedigo’s collaboration with Chat Pile, In the Earth Again, in this feature on the best folk music of the year—which wouldn’t entirely be wrong, for what it’s worth. That album’s at least partially folk, along with noise rock, metal and post-rock. But Pedigo’s solo album from this year, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, is too beautiful an album not to highlight on its own, showcasing seven gentle and splendid compositions that revolve around the Amarillo, Texas guitarist’s intricate and mesmerizing performances. Pedigo pairs his signature fingerstyle guitar with subtle but effective additional elements throughout, like the melancholy strings in “Hermes” and “Houndstooth,” the eerie ambience of “Smoked,” and the beautifully bittersweet streaks of pedal steel on the title track. There’s not a moment here that isn’t achingly gorgeous at a minimum, but small details rise to the surface with closer listens, a lush landscape coming into focus.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Sophia Djebel Rose – Sécheresse
Sofia Djebel Rose’s solitary dirges often feel as heavy as doom metal. The French-Moroccan singer/songwriter dwells in deeply unnerving spaces with her music, whether via her own compositions or grotesque traditional ballads (see: “Blanche biche,” the breathtaking horror centerpiece of Sécheresse), and a sense of menace pervades the album. Yet there’s an undeniable beauty within these strange and violent vignettes, the kind of aesthetic majesty that marks the difference between weekend-rental slasher films and arthouse horror. The experience is harrowing, but I dare not look away.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Alan Sparhawk – With Trampled by Turtles
I knew even before hearing a note of Alan Sparhawk’s full-length collaboration with Trampled by Turtles that it was going to be a heavy emotional experience. The former Low frontman’s previous album, last year’s White Roses, My God, was a curious work defined by grief, but likewise of finding a new joy alike through the language of hyperpop. In working with Duluth’s Trampled by Turtles (including on two songs that were also featured on White Roses, but in dramatically different arrangements), Sparhawk strips everything bare to an all-acoustic (for the most part) record that doesn’t obscure the anguish but rather centers it through utterly devastating moments like “Screaming Song.” A heartbreaking and beautifully honest work.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Los Thuthanaka – Los Thuthanaka
The music of Los Thuthanaka, the duo of Bolivian-American artist Chuquimamani-Condori and their sibling Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, is overwhelming. On its face, it might seem like an odd fit here—the loudest of all 20 records by a pretty hefty margin—distorted and intense… and did I mention it was loud? Which inevitably means a first listen probably won’t be sufficient to untangle everything that’s happening. The root of the duo’s sound is indigenous Andean music, but filtered through psychedelic, synth-laden soundscapes, heavy doses of distortion, and splattered with all manner of exclamatory ephemera. Even amid its booming presence, there are moments of gorgeous, shape-shifting beauty, like “Parrandita ‘Sariri Tunupa’,” which slowly evolves as a rich and majestic piece. Traditional sounds are at the foundation, but there’s nothing traditional at all about the final product, a joyfully cacophonous celebration of queer and indigenous identity that leaves a big impression.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
U – Archenfield
I first caught wind of the mysterious U when his music was compared to Milkweed, another British act that takes a plunderphonic approach to folk, and now at the end of the year, I can’t help but find space for both of their latest releases. In some ways, that’s part of what playing folk music is—piecing together parts of things that already exist to make something new. And in listening to Archenfield, a work entirely dedicated to repurposed material relating to the titular area in Herefordshire, England, it’s akin to finding a curious relic, ghosts captured on tape and people and places half-remembered and documented in fading ink. In the manner of another artist with a penchant for plumbing the archives, The Caretaker’s James Leland Kirby, U manipulates and puts a distorted lens over much of what he assembles, and the journey is anything but linear, but as aural scrapbooks go, it finds the perfect balance of chilling and comforting.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Eli Winter – A Trick of the Light
Throughout the year, I lend my endorsement to lots of albums behind the scenes to the rest of Treble’s writers, often with an urgent exclamation of “holy shit, you have to hear this!” Eli Winter’s A Trick of the Light was one of those albums, a record that captivated me within the first five minutes of the sprawling 16 of “Arabian Nightingale,” an electrifying take on a Don Cherry composition. That an artist I’d already admired within a folk space was delivering something closer to spiritual jazz had caught me by surprise, but the execution is so thrilling and powerful I just had to spread the word. Dazzling as that opening monolith is, the whole of A Trick of the Light is phenomenal, dipping into jazz, post-rock, Americana and even a little bit of the American primitivist-style folk that Winter began his career with. That it covers so much ground perhaps suggests this isn’t the proper place to classify it, but even in covering this much ground, Winter leaves a trail from where his last album left off to where this bold new frontier leads.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
The Worm – Pantilde
Pantilde is a charming and strange album from a strange and charming artist. Cornish singer and performer Amy Lawrence makes music as The Worm, crafting a sort of earthy fantasy realm through stark yet otherworldly compositions that sometimes comprise little more than recorder, drum and voice, but capture a quirkily supernatural sensibility in spite of their relative minimalism. Part of that comes from Lawrence’s own oddball narratives about entering “some kind of portal made of birds” or how the grass grows on her nose. But in its sparse and ramshackle sound, Pantilde recontextualizes psychedelia as countryside busker, its best moments evoking Syd Barrett, Arthur Russell and Broadcast’s acoustic songs. This kind of album can charm you instantly or leave you disoriented or maybe both—let’s call it both.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek – Yarın Yoksa
Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek doubled down on the grooves with their collaboration with El Michels Affair, Yarın Yoksa, an album that bolsters the sound of their psychedelic Turkish folk with funkafied cool. And let there be no mistake here, this album is as cool as it gets. Yıldırım’s voice and bağlama are the grounding elements here, while the band and certified soul sorcerer Michels thicken the atmosphere, make it a little more lush and velvety. The fusion of the two comes together most spectacularly on moments like “İstanbul’un Kuşları,” wherein an otherwise more stripped-down approach gets wrapped in fuzz and made all the more dazzling.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
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