Keeley
Girl On the Edge Of The World
(Definitive Gaze)
⭑⭑⭑☆☆

THE press release for Keeley’s third album explains that the life of Inga Maria Hauser — an 18-year-old German backpacker whose 1988 murder in Northern Ireland remains unsolved — has been the subject of the Anglo-Irish band’s whole discography to date.

Turns out the group’s frontwoman Keeley Moss is the author of an extensive blog about Hauser, and has appeared as an expert in several documentaries about the crime.

All of which lends the set of reverb-heavy dream-pop — what Moss calls the group’s “sonic swirl” — a certain intensity.

There is a strong sense of movement and travel. “It’s 1988, I am a girl with a taste for the world,” she sings on the harder-edged Crossing Lands, before a couple of London-based tracks and the album closes, poignantly, with a home recording of Hauser singing Take Me Home, Country Roads.

Lucinda Williams
World Gone Wrong
(Highway 20/Thirty Tigers)
⭑⭑⭑☆☆

AS the title suggests, the new record from Lucinda Williams is a commentary on contemporary politics in the United States.

Anger and indignation course through the set of country-tinged blues rock. “Things are gettin’ tight … empty houses all over town,” the US singer-songwriter sings. “We gotta be strong / Dark days are getting long.” There is a cover of Bob Marley’s So Much Trouble In The World, and the plodding country and harmonica on Low Life brings to mind Neil Young’s regular acoustic excursions. Trump and his supporters are the clear targets (“the Devil is a master salesman”) though for me the vague lyrical refrains are pretty banal.

Presumably because of her stroke in 2020, the now 72-year old Williams doesn’t play guitar but let’s be honest — it’s her extraordinary soul-drenched, emotive vocals we all come to hear.

Ye Vagabonds
All Tied Together
(River Lea)
⭑⭑⭑☆☆

FORMED in the early 2010s, Irish folk duo Ye Vagabonds — brothers Brian and Diarmuid Mac Gloinn — have moved away from singing folk standards, with their new album made up of entirely original compositions.

Produced by Philip Weinrobe (Adreinne Lenker) and recorded live in a house in Galway, apparently the authors Claire Keegan and George Sanders were inspirations for the set. “All these songs have addresses,” says Diarmuid. “They’re about specific locations and specific people.”

It’s all nice enough — the brothers clearly have a knack for writing and performing evocative and accessible folk tunes — though it lacks the edge and inventiveness of compatriots such as Lisa O’Neill, John Francis Flynn and Lankum.

Mumford & Sons is the obvious (lazy?) comparison, and Ye Vagabonds intense tour in the first six months of 2026 suggests the boys are on their way up.