In the hands of Courtney Barnett, fragments of everyday life become rich and riveting. A deft lyricist and virtuosic guitarist with inimitable musicianship, Barnett first found critical acclaim with 2013's The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas and broke into the mainstream in 2015 with her debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. Garnering a coveted Best New Artist Grammy nomination and numerous other accolades, the album stands as a generational classic. Barnett followed her debut with 2017's Lotta Sea Lice, an acclaimed collaborative record with Kurt Vile, and eschewed the vignettes of her early records on 2018's Tell Me How You Really Feel, her humid, political sophomore record. In 2021, she released Things Take Time, Take Time, a remarkable artistic step forward. On March 27th, 2026 Courtney will release her 4th studio album, Creature of Habit.

Grammy and BRIT award winners, Mumford and Sons return with their 6th studio album Prizefighter. Co-produced by Mumford and Sons and Aaron Dessner, and featuring Hozier, Gracie Abrams, Gigi Perez, and Chris Stapleton.

“I’ve always wanted to use that title,” Sam Beam says of Hen’s Teeth, his eighth full-length album and his sixth for Sub Pop Records. “I just love it. To me it suggests the impossible. Hen’s teeth do not exist. And that’s what this record felt like: a gift that shouldn’t be there but it is. An impossible thing but it’s real.”

However dimly we perceive it, we are living through a change of worlds. The one we were born into is slipping away, reshaped and denuded by human action. What remains is the question of what we will carry forward, and how we will refuse to surrender ourselves. Will Oldham’s new album, We Are Together Again, feels like an answer. In Oldham’s songs - and in the circle of others gathered beneath the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy - friendship, community, and the stubborn joy of making art with others become a means of persistence. This isn’t a denial of collapse, which would be delusion, but a kind of defiance: remaining fully human, fully joyful, in a world with a diminishing horizon.

Italian singer-songwriter Marta Del Grandi returns with Dream Life, an album that bustles in a field of dreams, a multi-dimensional panoramic snapshot punctuated with serene disillusionment, that transcends musical boundaries as personal hopes and aspirations are cast against the vastness of the stars and beyond.

With her first album Undertow, London-based composer/singer-songwriter Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi reveals stark vulnerability nestled in a dark ambience that is both intimate and expansive. Voice and cello provide the bedrock of a detail focused record, that threads together memory, grief, growth and connection. Undertow took its shape during an acclimation of sensuality and self, through a period of processing trauma, and all of life, love and loss that it surrounds and intertwines with. ‘Undertow’ binds this intimacy with the corporeal, spanning violation and deep trust. It deals with the fallout of the victims of violence against women, voyaging through fear and pain to absolution.

OUR FREE CD! MADE TO LOVE MAGIC: To accompany this month’s Uncut cover story, a free 15-track CD of music in the spirit of Nick Drake comes with the issue. Inside, you will find tracks from the likes of Joan Shelley, Adrianne Lenker, Cass McCombs, Robyn Hitchcock and more!

Due to her youth (16 when she first hit Myspace, 17 when signed to an imprint of EMI, and 18 when her debut album came out), perky-cute looks and extremely British diction, singer/songwriter Laura Marling got a lot of comparisons to Lily Allen in her early buzz, but the quietly compelling Alas I Cannot Swim is not at all a frothy pop confection. A folk-tinged AAA pop record based on Marling's alluringly husky voice and graceful acoustic guitar, Alas I Cannot Swim would be more aptly compared to the likes of Feist, Keren Ann, or Regina Spektor. (In the album's press kit, Marling reveals her primary influence to be Bonnie "Prince" Billy, which also seems appropriate.) Although not to draw too forbidding a comparison, opening track and first single "Ghosts" is most strongly reminiscent of Joni Mitchell circa For the Roses, both in Marling's expressive vocal phrasing and the expert shifts in the arrangement between solo acoustic passages and full-band sections, not to mention an excellently deployed string section. That old-school '70s singer/songwriter vibe predominates throughout the album, in fact.

As if cosmically enacted, Neko Case breaks to the surface once again with the new album Neon Grey Midnight Green and reminds listeners that she is one of our greatest living songwriters - perpetually becoming more fearless and adventurous.

Performed across two nights at the Royal Dramaten Theatre in Stockholm in March of 2017, Who By Fire is a theatrical staging of Leonard Cohen’s songs, poems and letters. Conceived and anchored by First Aid Kit, the band are joined by an array of guest artists, two actors, an 8 member band and strings and on two songs a 20 strong choir. An incredibly ambitious undertaking, they selected and sequenced all of the material performed and collaborated with the theatre and their music director to stage and orchestrate the show.

Waxhatchee’s Saint Cloud is an unflinching self-examination whose raw, exposed narrative terrain is aided by a shift in sonic arrangements. While her last two records (Out in the Storm and Ivy Tripp) featured the kind of big guitars, well-honed noise, and battering sounds that characterized her Philadelphia scene and strongly influenced a burgeoning new class of singer-songwriters, Saint Cloud strips back those layers to create space for Katie Crutchfield’s voice and lyrics. The result is a classic Americana sound with modern touches befitting an artist who has emerged as one of the signature storytellers of her time.