Hear the Best New Folk Music with Fresh Cuts Friday
Discover the Best New Music of the Week!
We’ve pulled together some of the best new music we’ve heard lately — including the latest from Tanasi, Courtney Hartman, Tift Merritt, Mason Jennings, and more. You can hear it all on Fresh Cuts, my weekly radio hour. Tune in every Friday at 2pm ET / 11am PT on Folk Alley’s 24/7 stream — available on our website, mobile app, or your smart speaker too.
Prefer to listen on your own time? Just click on the Fresh Cuts stream whenever it works for you.
In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek at some exciting new music that’s caught our ears this week!
Tanasi, “Get Up/Ore Mi Kini Se”
Tanasi’s new debut album from the band based in Asheville, North Carolina is out now. With Billy Cardine on dobro and slide instruments, Anya Hinkle on vocals and guitar, and Mary Lucey on vocals, upright bass, and clawhammer banjo.
Courtney Hartman, “Honey Honey”
With You: From the Garden Shed (out 6/12) features acoustic versions of Courtney Hartman’s album With You (2025). “Last May, I spent a week with my friend and collaborator, Shane Leonard, recording solo versions of all the songs on With You. We set up in the garden shed where many of the songs first began. The inspiration for the project came as I was sitting on the floor last winter, playing the songs for my daughter, preparing to take them on tour. The spaciousness of playing them solo felt special, and I wanted to capture that to share with you.” – Courtney Hartman
Tift Merritt, “Someone To Watch the Band With Me”
Sugar (out 6/26) is Tift Merritt’s first album in a decade featuring “Someone To Watch the Band With Me.” She shares “There’s something really lonely about the digital world when you can get anything you want delivered but finding real human connection seems fraught,” says Merritt about the new single. “I’m fifty, I have three jobs, a kid, no time; how am I going to find someone? I just wanted to say really directly, something that might cut through the noise, a signal flare. We make everything else so easy to find, why does love remain elusive?”
Mason Jennings, “Say Goodbye To the Ground”
Across the 11 songs on Dark Wings (out 7/10), the Minneapolis-based singer/songwriter Mason Jennings grapples with trauma, faith, survival, and hope. “These last couple years have been destabilizing and challenging for most of us. In times of stress and grief and anger I continue to turn to, and have great faith in, the Creative Spirit and the power of hope and love in the human heart,” says Jennings. “That’s what this album is a result of and a testament to.”
More this week on Fresh Cuts!
Aldous Harding – “Venus in the Zinnia” (feat. H. Hawkline)
Cinder Well – “While the Womb Screams Silently”
Jobi Riccio – “Love of the Song”-
Kevin Morby – “Javelin”
Lambchop – “Weakened”
Libby Weitnauer – “How To Hurt”
Ryan Bingham – “Ballad of The Texas Gentlemen”
Shakey Graves – “Time Flies”
Teddy Thompson – “The Game”
