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5. There’s Nothing Fawlty About Natalie Wildgoose’s Sibyl

The creator of one of my favourite EPs of last year, North Yorkshire/London songwriter Natalie Wildgoose feels like an artist on a distinctly upward trajectory. Now working with the state51 label, Natalie released her new EP, Rural Hours, this week. Following the excellent Come Into The Garden, which was recorded on a series of pianos across the Yorkshire Dales, Rural Hours was made in a typically unexpected way. Natalie again shunned the traditional recording studio and set up alongside collaborators Chris Brain and Owen Spafford in a bothy high up in the Yorkshire Dales, two hours’ walk from the nearest village and without either heating or electricity. Playing by candlelight, it’s an intimate collection, “inspired by life and loss in North Yorkshire”.

Marking the release, Natalie shared the video for the EP’s latest single, Sibyl. The track is inspired not so much by North Yorkshire as the myths of Ancient Greece. The Sibylline Oracles are a collection of pronouncements attributed to the Sibyls, a collection of prophetesses known for their divine revelations and frenzied delivery. As fans of Natalie’s work won’t be surprised to hear, her delivery here is a little less frenzied, more poised and precise as she nestles into the comfort of a backing of arpeggiated guitar chords and drifting, almost formless piano runs. Atop the whisper of a musical backing, Natalie ponders immortality, both the burden it could become, “oh my, never ending life, death pull me under”, and the trade off it might require, “I should’ve wished to be a star, now all that’s left is just a voice trapped in a glass jar”. With the slight Grecian twist on Natalie’s usual distinctly pastoral Yorkshire viewpoint, she seems to tap into her inner Leonard Cohen, pondering life, death and everything that happens in between, in a way that’s poetic, beautiful and just the right amount of melancholy. These Rural Hours have been well spent; this might just be Natalie’s finest work yet.

Rural Hours is out now via state51. For more information on Natalie Wildgoose visit https://linktr.ee/nataliewildgoose

4. Mountain Of Youth Is On The Road To Nowhere

A Georgia native, Hunter Morris is what you might call a musical lifer. He started taking music seriously when he went to college, and after returning to Athens from a brief period in Wyoming, Hunter balanced life as a fly-fishing guide with a string of rock bands, perfecting his trade. After years of being noisy, he recently felt the urge to strip things back, and started to make sense of himself, “when I started writing these songs as Mountain of Youth, it felt like I’d finally found my voice. For the first time I felt comfortable saying what I needed to say”. We’ll all find out what Hunter needs to say when the debut Mountains Of Youth record arrives in May. For now, he’s treated us to a first taste of the record via the record’s title track, Nowhere, NW.

The track introduces the listeners to the record’s “metaphorical location”, Nowhere, NW, a place Hunter explains is, “where everyone was born, and we have to decide whether we want to stay there or go see what else is waiting to be discovered out in the world”. Here he explores the idea of a couple, who, “come of age together, have their ups and downs, and eventually have to decide if they want to stay or go. In the end, I guess we realise that we all end up nowhere anyway”. Musically, the track seems to sit in the wonderful middle ground of Americana-twang and slacker-rock shuffle, as the bassy lead line wanders atop hand-claps, drums and bright indie-pop tinged rhythm guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Teenage Fanclub record. Despite its rich vein of lyrical nihilism, Hunter does manage to make the soundtrack to Nowhere sound distinctly sunny, whether it’s the chorus’ repetition of “nowhere” or the wrly delivered verses, “you can never outrun time or love, but by God you can try”, it’s all delivered with a sprightly swagger. If Nowhere all sounds this good, then it might be a place we all want to call home.

Nowhere, NW is out May 15th via Strolling Bones Records. For more information on Hunter Morris / Mountains Of Youth visit https://mountain-of-youth.bandcamp.com/

3. Kevin Morby Even Makes The Badlands Sound Good

We’re now just a matter of weeks away from the much-anticipated release of the Aaron Dessner-produced Little Wide Open. Kevin Morby’s eighth studio album, it is a record novelist Rachel Kushner describes in her essay on the record as being about, “his origins in the Midwest and every duty and modesty and familiarity and isolation: the land, the people, and the parts of that inside him”. Ahead of the release this week, Kevin shared the latest single from it Badlands, which is perhaps the most overt reflection on his hometown, Kansas City, to date.

Kevin explains the song is about his relationship with the American Midwest, “Kansas City is not the badlands, but it’s my badlands. It’s not the Bible Belt, but it’s my Bible Belt”. Featuring backing vocals from Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Badlands is Kevin Morby at his dusty big sky best. All pattering drum rhythms and sun-scorched guitar wrangling, as his world-weary vocal zooms in on his home state once more, “welcome to the Midwest, where the sky knows best, and you’ll finally get some rest, ‘til the tornado sirens start harmonising”. While it probably won’t be featuring in the tourist board commercials anytime soon, Badlands does lay bare his love-hate relationship with the place, as his initial uncertainty, “I can’t tell if I’m in Heaven or if I’m in the Badlands”, gives way to the closing refrain, “Heaven is a place on earth, on earth”. Many of us share that sense of home being a place we love and loathe in equal measure, the place we can’t escape that shaped who we are, badlands or nirvana, it stays with us as long as we’re here, “just passengers just passing by”.

Little Wide Open is out May 15th via Dead Oceans. For more information on Kevin Morby visit https://www.kevinmorby.com/.

2. Massive Attack & Tom Waits Put The Boot In

You know what they say about hiatus-breaking singles, they’re like buses, you wait about 15 years, and then two come along at once. The last time around for Bristolian trip-hoppers Massive Attack was 2010’s Heligoland, for Tom Waits it was 2011’s Bad As Me, both records that are nearly old enough to leave home or go out drinking with their mates, both even older than this music blog you’re reading. Time has passed, the world has changed, yet these aren’t the sort of artists anyone’s going to forget about. This week, the two artists combined to share the intriguing collaboration, Boots On The Ground, a track written many years ago, but one with a message Tom Waits suggests, “will never go out of style”.

The common ground between Massive Attack and Tom Waits might not be initially obvious, but look through their back catalogues and biographies, and you’ll find rich pickings of anti-war sentiments. Massive Attack’s 2006 track False Flags lamented the deceptions of governments on both sides of the Atlantic that led us to war in Iraq, while Tom Waits has regularly sang of young men sent to fight other people’s wars, whether it’s Road To Peace’s 2006 commentary on the middle east, or back in 1983 when Soldier’s Things questioned the price soldiers pay for the limited rewards they receive. Here, Waits seems to take on the role of a wisened soldier overseas, lamenting his worth as just boots on the ground, moved around by politicians for political gain, the, “Air-conditioned fuckstick loafers, sittin’ in a room full of army posters”. There’s both anger and sadness here, as amid Massive Attack’s electronic backing, Waits plays out a stereotypical young man on his first trip abroad, living life like a computer game, “Big titties, big titties, well we holler and we burn down cities”, until he realises he’s not playing, “Cold and hot as Satan’s hoof, spinning on the world, I’m hiding on a roof. I kill a brown man I never ass knew, choked on spit and then he turned blue”. The overarching feeling here is of waste, of lives lost on two sides of a war that nobody really wants, boots on the ground rotting alongside the humans that wore them, a result of what Massive Attack describe as, “ pulses of callous impulse & abandoned mind“. While these long overdue returns are reasons to celebrate, this song is a difficult, challenging reminder of the all to familiar state of the world they’re coming back to.

Boots On The Ground is now via Play It Again Sam/ANTI-. For more information on Massive Attack visit https://www.massiveattack.co.uk/ and for Tom Waits its http://www.tomwaits.com/

1. Movies Can Wait, Listen To A Box Of Stars Right Now

The man behind A Box Of Stars, Macaulay Lerman, describes himself as, “a maker of songs, poems and pictures”, and in his music, he seems to combine all three. It was back in 2018 that A Box Of Stars emerged with the long EP/short album, Days Drunk Off Heat. Various releases have followed, but nothing since 2023’s Somethinghood. That time between records was spent both writing and crucially living, processing the end of a long term relationship, “grieving a previous time in life and an imagined future”. For Macaulay, the future had looked like Walnut Street, a cluster of houses in Burlington, Vermont, where he and his former partner would walk, and allow themselves a brief dream of building a house there. Walnut Street is also the title of the upcoming A Box Of Stars record, out in the middle of May, and previewed this week by his new single, Movies Later.

Movies Later is almost an attempt to sing himself out of the funk of a relationship ending, as Macaulay explains through writing the song, he could communicate with his future self and, “make contact with a more coherent character that my conscious mind wasn’t quite ready to rally behind“. The track is a beautifully unfurling beast, as the wavering violins and propulsive bass bring to mind the likes of Friendship or Langkamer. Particularly wonderful are the twin vocals, Macaulay’s lead accompanied at times by Katy Hellman before they inevitably depart, matched in the way the lyrics discuss a shared history and an uncoupled future, “it’s not that I want the past, I want a photograph”. While it probably never steps wholeheartedly into the future, and the moment of complete closure is perhaps still to come, it’s in the chorus where we get closest, with a simple farewell, “so thank you, I love you, goodbye, I’ll see you at a funeral when our college friends die or at a birthday party on the other side of remembering”. Ultimately, this was for Macaulay a song he had to write, “the person we’ve been needs to speak to the person we are in order to conjure the person we will be“, summed up in the closing line here, “you’ll be different then. And I’ll be different then. But it’s hard to say just how”. A spellbinding return that suggests, while he might never live in Walnut Street full time, as a tour guide, A Box Full Of Stars couldn’t be better placed to show us around.

Walnut Street is out May 15th. For more information on A Box Of Stars visit https://aboxofstars.bandcamp.com/.

Header photo is A Box Of Stars by Georgia Blake