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Indie Folk

Newquay, after Slowdive

Neil Halstead

Neil Halstead was born in Reading in 1970 and spent the 1990s fronting Slowdive and then the slower, country-leaning Mojave 3. Shortly after Slowdive split he moved to Newquay in Cornwall, so he could surf. His first solo album came out on 4AD in 2002, built partly from songs left over from Mojave 3. The second, in 2008, went out on Brushfire, the label run by his friend and fellow surfer Jack Johnson. Nick Holton produced the third, released by Sonic Cathedral in 2012 and recorded in the music room of a junior school near Wallingford with a local folk group, Band of Hope. It went straight to half-inch tape, so most songs got one or two takes. He went back to releasing solo music in 2025.

Portland, 2000

The Decemberists

Colin Meloy grew up in Helena, Montana, studied creative writing in Missoula and sang in a band there called Tarkio. In 2000 he moved to Portland, Oregon, paid the rent working at a pizza parlour and played open mics. He met Chris Funk at one of his solo shows, and Nate Query, who introduced him to Jenny Conlee. The band name points to the Decembrist revolt in Russia in 1825. Castaways and Cutouts came out on Hush in 2002. Picaresque was recorded in a former church and was their last record for Kill Rock Stars before Capitol signed them in late 2005. A barn outside Portland, with Peter Buck and Gillian Welch guesting, produced The King Is Dead, which went to number one on the Billboard 200 in 2011.

Seattle, Sub Pop, 2008

Fleet Foxes

Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset met at Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, outside Seattle, and bonded over Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Brian Wilson. They formed the band in Seattle in 2006, first calling it The Pineapples. Sub Pop signed them in January 2008, and the debut album that June sold more than 408,000 copies in North America and won Uncut's first Music Award. Josh Tillman played drums from 2008 until early 2012, then left and became Father John Misty. The second album reached number four in the US. After that Pecknold went to study at Columbia in New York, and the band returned in 2017 on Nonesuch. The fourth album, largely a solo effort, came out on Anti- in 2020.

Wolverhampton, Mush then Warp

Bibio

Bibio is Stephen Wilkinson, born in the West Midlands in 1978 and based in Wolverhampton. He took the name from a black-and-red fishing fly his father used for trout in Wales. He studied sonic arts at Middlesex University, and in 2001 he found Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band, which got him into fingerpicking and alternative tunings. Marcus Eoin of Boards of Canada recommended him to Mush, which signed him in 2004 and released his first albums, ending with Vignetting the Compost in 2009. Warp had already signed him in 2008. Silver Wilkinson, in 2013, was meant to sound more live, and he recorded much of it at home, some of it out in the garden with a 12-string guitar and a cassette recorder.

Needham to Nashville

Marissa Nadler

Marissa Nadler was born in Washington, D.C., in 1981 and grew up in Needham, Massachusetts. She studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, and one of her own paintings ended up on the cover of a 2018 album. Her debut, Ballads of Living and Dying, came out on Eclipse in 2004 and set words by Pablo Neruda and Edgar Allan Poe to music. The sound starts from old-school country and folk and drifts toward gothic Americana, and in the early years she toured with guitarist Jack Rose and the drone band Earth. After running her own label for a couple of years she moved to Sacred Bones in 2013. She made an album with Stephen Brodsky in 2019. She lives in Nashville now, and her tenth album came out in 2025.

Abilene, Sketchbook, 2004

Micah P. Hinson

Micah P. Hinson was born in Memphis in 1981 and grew up in Abilene, Texas, where his father taught at Abilene Christian University. He found the town confining and took up skateboarding and guitar. For a while he was bankrupt and homeless and dependent on drugs. John Mark Lapham of The Earlies took him on and produced Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress, which came out on Sketchbook in 2004. The Sunday Times said he got as close to Tom Waits as anyone reasonably could. In 2011 his tour van overturned in Spain, and for a while he could only sing until physiotherapy gave him back the use of his arms. He splits his time between Madrid and Denton, and his latest album came out in 2025.

The Collection