10 Great Folk Albums from 2024
The timelessness of great folk music makes it something that never goes out of style, and something that we just can’t seem to ever get enough of. Sometimes, time-tested folk traditions infiltrate the most widely-acclaimed albums of the year, and other times, they exist more in the margins, mostly to be consumed by devotees and true believers. Both of those categories exist on this list of 10 great folk albums from 2024, and if you haven’t heard all of them, you might be surprised to hear just how similar an itch they all scratch, whether it’s a critical darling or an underrated gem.
Read on for the list, in alphabetical order…
Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future (4AD)
Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker is a generational’ talent with a growing catalog of great solo and band albums, and 2024’s Bright Future is a particularly special one. She headed to a studio in the woods of New England with four collaborators to make it, and none of them listened to the recordings, all done analog, until they’d finished. The resulting songs are heart-rending in their stark beauty, and even when Adrianne is chronicling specific details, remembering her mom crying when the family dog was put to sleep on “Real House,” the emotions they evoke feel universal. At her recent NYC shows, Adrianne made a majestic Brooklyn theater feel intimate, and made many in attendance cry, with the quiet power of this material. It aims straight for your heart without excess production or ornamentation, just the raw conviction of good songs that will resonate with you for a long time. [A.H.]
Allegra Krieger – Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine (Double Double Whammy)
Allegra Krieger has been busy; her fifth album, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine arrives just over a year after last year’s great I Keep My Feet On The Fragile Plane, and less than a year after its collection of b-sides. It’s also a clear step forward from Fragile Plane, incorporating a wider range of sounds and collaborators into her somber, ’70s-folk-inspired sound, from the fully fleshed out indie rock of “Never Arriving” to “How Do You Sleep, which is scorched with noisy guitar. Krieger’s juxtapositions of NYC as a place where beauty and tragedy live side by side are sharp as ever — she calls the city “my favorite place in the whole wide world” on “Into Eternity,” but it’s also where she escaped a fire in her Chinatown apartment building that killed four of her neighbors last summer, inspiring “One or the Other.” Her incisive observations have the same quiet staying power of her melodies, and both stick around long after you’ve first heard them. [A.H.]
Dorothea Paas – Think of Mist (Telephone Explosion)
Best known for her arrangement and vocal contributions on other people’s albums, Dorothea Paas does her most magical work on her own music. Her ethereal voice and way with layering harmonies are utterly bewitching and transportive; paired with the light jazzy melodies and nimble backing (courtesy the Toronto indie scene’s finest players), it’s enough to send 1000 ships onto the rocks and the bottom of the ocean. Water is in fact a central lyrical theme on the album: “I wish I were a diver / elegant and free / controlled and abandoned / simultaneously,” she sings on “Diver,” one of many diaphanous siren songs here. If you can’t make it to the sea, Think of Mist is also the perfect soundtrack to a long hot bath. [B.P.]
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – Woodland (Acony)
After nearly a decade since her last solo album, Gillian Welch and her lifelong collaborator David Rawlings returned in 2020 with the Grammy-winning covers album All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone)–the first album officially credited to both of them–and four years later, they returned with their first joint album of original music, Woodland. Often times, Woodland fills the room with nothing more than the warmth of their acoustic guitars and voices. Other times, gorgeous strings and some light drumming help flesh things out. Throughout it at all, Gillian and David deliver a collection of folk songs as remarkable as anything on their timeless classics like Time (The Revelator) and Soul Journey. Coming off an album on which some of the material was written over a hundred years ago, the original music of Woodland captures a similar feeling, sounding like the past and the future all at once. [A.S.]
Itasca – Imitation of War (Paradise of Bachelors)
For her latest Itasca album, Kayla Cohen took her ’60s/’70s-style psychedelic folk in a slightly more full-band rock direction. With help from members of Wand and Gun Outfit (the latter of which Kayla also plays in), she does things like go off into jammy territory on the nine-and-a-half minute “Easy Spirit.” The electric guitar suits Kayla’s otherworldly voice as much as an acoustic does, and like Itasca’s more stripped-down material, Imitation of War sounds as alluring in 2024 as it would have at Woodstock. [A.S.]
Jessica Pratt – Here In the Pitch (Mexican Summer)
Jessica Pratt makes out-of-time music, meticulously crafted tiny gems that sound like a lost ’60s artifact, Brill Building by way of Karen Dalton and Gal Costa, where folk, girl group sounds and bossa nova mingle at a party thrown by Burt Bacharach. Here in the Pitch is Pratt’s most lushly produced album to date with mellotrons, Fender Rhodes electric piano, bongos, and saxophone backing her and her nylon string guitar. Yet the album is still as hushed as Jessica’s previous work, sounding like these songs were beamed in from a distant star where the accompaniment is half a light year behind, faint in the distance, still waiting to catch up to whatever time her present is. [B.P.]
Joan Shelley – Mood Ring EP (No Quarter)
In the time since she released her excellent 2022 album The Spur, Joan Shelley gave birth to her daughter and moved out of the rural Kentucky area that she was raised in, and throughout all that, she found time to write and record the five songs that make up her brief but impactful new EP Mood Ring. It’s the latest in a long line of instantly-timeless records from Joan, and it captures all the same magic that we’ve come to expect from her. True to Joan’s usual form, it echoes ’60s/’70s folk singers like Joni Mitchell and Sandy Denny while fitting in nicely with a range of likeminded contemporaries–including some of the artists on this very list–and the songs feel like classics that you’ve known your whole life. [A.S.]
Laura Marling – Patterns In Repeat (Chrysalis/Partisan)
Motherhood informs Laura Marling’s eighth album in more ways than one. Laura’s words are filled with themes of birth, life, caregiving, childhood, and parenthood, and also how new life can bring on thoughts of the looming threat of death, and even the way the album was made was impacted by the birth of her daughter. To be able to spend more time with her newborn, she recorded most of the album at home, and her often-hushed delivery is sometimes a result of trying not to wake her. (Apparently if you listen closely enough, you can also at times hear her daughter and the family’s dog in the background.) Strings were added later but drums were not, resulting in one of Laura’s quietest, most delicate-sounding albums. Laura had apparently held some fears that motherhood might negatively impact her artistry, but I think many would agree that it’s clearly only enhanced it. [A.S.]
Naima Bock – Below a Massive Dark Land (Sub Pop)
Naima Bock’s sophomore solo album finds the former Goat Girl bassist leaning much more into British folk with fewer nods to tropicalia than on her fantastic 2022 debut album Giant Palm, but there’s no mistaking her vocals which are steeped in deep sadness whether she’s weeping in heartache over delicate acoustic guitar, or backed with soulful horns. When she belts it out, like on the raw breakup song “Lines” where she sings “I still remember the day / When you cast me aside,” it can send shivers down your spine. [B.P.]
Rosali – Bite Down (Merge)
I don’t think anyone has summed up Rosali’s new album Bite Down better than Steven Hyden calling it “Sandy Denny jamming with Crazy Horse on a late night in the mid-1970s,” so I won’t attempt to try, but I will add that it’s pretty remarkable how well Rosali captures that 50 years removed from this imagined scenario. The North Carolina / Philadelphia singer/songwriter (whose full name is Rosali Middleman) has been releasing albums of warm, earthy folk music for nearly a decade, and on this one–her Merge debut–her Crazy Horse-esque backing band is the David Nance Group, whose rugged jams couldn’t work more perfectly with her transportive voice. It sounds like a lost gem from the past but it also sounds totally timeless, and the songwriting is magnetic. Whether it’s an immediate hook like “Rewind” and “My Kind” or more of a slow-burner that creeps up on you like “Change Is In The Form,” every song on Bite Down lures you in and never lets you go. [A.S.]
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