Rose in June

Boden's presence on the 21st-century British folk scene has been colossal – from his stint in Eliza Carthy's Ratcatchers band through the celebrated Spiers & Boden partnership to Bellowhead's ascendency. Solo and with his band The Remnant Kings, he's released three albums as well as the 12-volume A Folk Song a Day project. But while 2009's Songs from the Floodplain and 2017's Afterglow mined dark themes of post-oil and ecologically driven social collapse, Rose in June takes a step away from apocalypse for an energetic mix of traditional songs, including the epic title-track (about two seaman who lost their lives in a North Sea storm aboard the Rose in June), as well as typically dramatic accounts of ‘Rigs of the Time’ and ‘Seven Bonnie Gypsies’. There's several fine tunes, too, including the Glam-rock-meets-trad of ‘Leviathan’, and two fine covers, one from Ewan MacColl and the other Kate Bush's ‘Hounds of Love’.

With a road-hardened ten-strong Remnant Kings having already played these new songs on many a stage, there's a palpable electricity and intuitive group dynamics lifting these performances, recorded at the venerable Rockfield Studios. There's a few tracks here, including ‘Beating the Bounds’, that already sound like 21st-century folk rock classics.