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Billie Marten: Dog Eared
New album: Beautiful, warm, intimate, gentle, experimental indie-folk by the singer-songwriter Isabella Tweddle from Ripon in North Yorkshire, in this delicious fifth LP, filled with love songs and nostalgic childhood memories, and following 2023’s Drop Cherries, an expansion of excellent musicians in the recording
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Alex G: Headlights
New album: This 10th album by the Pennsylvania indie musician, producer, and singer-songwriter Alexander Giannascoli brings a mellower sound than some of his previous LPs, with often gentle, skilfully rendered guitars, dream-like, wistful and fantastical lyrics, and beautifully drawing on Americana as well as key influences Elliott Smith and Neil Young
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Natalie Bergman: My Home Is Not In This World
New album: This stylishly retro second solo album by the Chicago-born LA-based singer-songwriter follows her acclaimed 2021 LP Mercy, and channels psychedelic soul and alt-60s pop, packed with beautiful, classic-feel, heartbreak songs, and with a title that yearns for that past era and sense of place
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Bruce Springsteen: Tracks II - The Lost Albums
New albums: Not bootlegs, B-sides or omitted songs from past albums (as in the 1998 Tracks outtakes release), this veritable mountain of unreleased gems – a whopping seven LPs spanning 1983–2018 with 82 unreleased songs and over five hours in a treasure trove of discovery for devoted and new fans
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S.G. Goodman: Planting By The Signs
New album: A third album of powerful, simmering, lyrically vivid, stripped-back folk, country and Americana by the singer-songwriter from Hickman, Kentucky, portraying stories and characters from a small town, with themes about the importance of and cycles of the natural world, and summoning a sound somewhere between Lucinda Williams and Cat Power
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Alan Sparhawk: With Trampled By Turtles
New album: Suffused with a warmth, tenderness and powerful, grieving melancholy, this second solo album by the Low co-founder since the death in 2022 of his wife and lifelong creative Mimi Parker joins him with the fabulous fellow Duluth, Minnesota bluegrass and folk band Trampled By Turtles
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Zoé Basha: Gamble
New album: A sparkling, delightful, charming, polished and witty self-released debut by the Dublin-based French-American singer and guitarist who mixes folk, country, jazz, blues, French chanson and Appalachian with crisply performed covers and originals
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Julien Baker & TORRES: Send A Prayer My Way
New album: The American singer-songwriter, guitarist and, one-third of Boygenius joins withTorres, aka indie singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott in a long-planned collaboration in musically straight pedal-steel country narrative love songs, but threaded with queer narratives
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Valerie June: Owls, Omens, and Oracles
New album: Stylish, catchy, charismatic, effervescent, uplifting, retro, Memphis soul, Americana and country by the singer-songwriter from Jackson, Tennessee whose distinctive, bright resonant voice has some echoes of Eartha Kitt and Macy Gray
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Alison Krauss and Union Station: Arcadia
New album: Classy, seasoned, crisply performed country, folk and bluegrass by the acclaimed Champaign, Illinois singer-songwriter and fiddle player, joined again by her perennial band, their first together since 2011’s Paper Airplane, and her first since the 2021’s album Raise The Roof with Robert Plant
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Bon Iver: SABLE, fABLE
New album: Wisconsin’s Justin Vernon returns with his fifth album, a sparse, tender, sometimes world-weary, but also often beautiful, distinctive fusion of folk, indie, R&B, soul, country, and a dash of soft rock, all wrapped in celebration of the salmon pink - “the colour of life”
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The Waterboys: Life, Death And Dennis Hopper
New album: A sprawling, lengthy, pseudo-beatnik rock-country release by the British band fronted by Mike Scott, here celebrating the life of the charismatic, often misunderstand hell-raising Hollywood icon, spanning multiple genres, particularly Americana, with a spread of guests including Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and Fiona Apple
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Hannah Cohen: Earthstar Mountain
New album: A warm, simmering, insightfully beautiful, bittersweet, gently paced, folk-country-pop album by the New Yorker Catskills Mountains-based singer-songwriter, made in collaboration with partner Sam Owens (aka Sam Evian) and including guest appearances from Sufjan Stevens and Clairo
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Jason Isbell: Foxes In The Snow
New album: Following four straight albums with his band the 400 Unit, the Nashville-based Grammy-winning Alabama singer-songwriter’s latest LP is a stripped back, heartfelt, candid, beautiful set of new Americana folk with just him and his 1940 Martin acoustic guitar
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Echolalia
New album: A Nashville ‘supergroup’ in the most free-flowing, relaxed form imaginable, Spencer Cullum, Andrew Combs, Jordan Lehning, Dominic Billett and others combine in a beautiful intertwining of pastoral folk, country, and dream-like, psychedelic Americana
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Melin Melyn: Mill On The Hill
New album: Enormously entertaining, witty, catchy, folk-country-psych-rock by the Cardiff-London band, with clear, upbeat comparisons to Gruff Rhys and Super Furry Animals as well as other original twists in this warm, vintage-feel new release
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Bartees Strange: Horror
New album: A diversely eclectic, genre-hopping, powerfully emotional LP of soul, funk, hip-hop, rock, indie, country, house and pop by the Washington DC-based artist, produced by Jack Antonoff, with songs facing fears as a young young, queer, black person in rural America, and inspired by the likes of Parliament Funkadelic, Fleetwood Mac, Teddy Pendergrass, and Neil Young
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Nadia Reid: Enter Now Brightness
New album: Warm, tender, thoughtfully profound, intelligent, finely crafted indie-folk with Laurel Canyon-era and Americana elements by the now Manchester-based New Zealand singer-songwriter on themes of change, motherhood, home, and heartbreak
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Bonnie "Prince" Billy: The Purple Bird
New album: A mischievously droll, but also tender, gently moving new release by Kentucky’s seasoned singer-songwriter Will Oldham, this time very much in Nashville-flavoured country mode, with numbers about community, relationships and the state of the nation, joined by producer and old friend David “ Ferg” Ferguson
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The second part of our favourite albums of 2024
Favourite albums of 2024: Welcome to The Song Bar’s favourite albums of 2024 Part 2. Part 1 can be found here. There’s no such thing as ‘best of’ and everything is subjective, but please dig into this rich seam of originality and quality, and even suggest more of your own
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