5 quiet indie folkers to discover

Indie-folk is a soft genre with the power to move listeners. Unfortunately, it is also a genre that, in my experience, gets a bit of a bad rap. At its worst, indie-folk can lean a little too far into Starbucks-core background music for its own good. But that is simply the tip of a very large iceberg, the one percent of a style worth exploring much more deeply. This spring’s new release calendar features a wave of quiet sounds that you should lean in and listen to; here are five indie-folkers that should absolutely be on your radar.

Greg Mendez

While this is not a Philly-centric list, I cannot help but kick things off by introducing you to Philly-based indie-folker Greg Mendez. Mendez has — by way of a winding, mercurial, often difficult road — become one of the brightest stars in the world of quite indie folk. His spare and intimate stylings earn obvious, yet valid comparisons to Elliot Smith, and they truly came to head on his 2023 self-titled record. We here at WXPN were lucky enough to have Mendez in the studio around that time; watching him play a song like “Maria” — a brief, grounded bit of storytelling with an earworm hook — makes the abundance of talent quite obvious.

Indie-folk is a genre littered with prolific practitioners, and Mendez is very much in that lineage. Late last year, Mendez followed-up his self-titled record with EP First Time/Alone, released on Dead Oceans. It saw him mess with, if not totally upend, his established sound. What’s perhaps most charming about Mendez as a songwriter is the deceptive modesty of his songs. A song like “Mountain Dew Hell,” which comes in at a teasingly brief 1:16, might sound inherently silly, but there’s a poignancy to the lonely scene of a man trapped in the titular soft-drink underworld, something that extends into his entire discography.

Lily Seabird

Okay, this is the last time I make this about Philadelphia, but I cannot describe just how excited I was to learn that Philly’s very own Lame-O Record was signing one of my favorite up-and-coming songwriters, Lily Seabird. Then, just last week, they released Seabird’s third record Trash Mountain, a gift to all of us Seabirds out there (still working on the fanclub name) and yet another reason to be excited for her Ortlieb’s concert on June 5th. It’s an album that comes hot on the heels of 2024’s Alas,. Where that record embraced a more blistering, alt-country sound, wonderfully captured on a song like “Dirge”, Trash Mountain leans into Seabird’s folkie instincts, earning comparisons (from this writer, anyway) to such legends of the genre as Lucinda Williams.

Seabird pulls off a number of wonderful tricks on the record, but perhaps best is how she chooses to bookend the record with a pair of title tracks, “Trash Mountain (1pm)” and “Trash Mountain (1am)”, which serve to show off the range of the album within. The way Seabird talks about the real Trash Mountain, an artist’s compound she shares with similarly-minded musicians, you get a sense that it serves as a kind of updated Big Pink (down to the house’s color, which you can spot on the LP’s cover). As songs, these two versions of “Trash Mountain” give listeners a sense of the heartfelt, slacker appeal of Seabird’s music. The former, especially, a breathless and meandering story told with unbroken profundity, is just the kind of observant songwriting that defines indie-folk’s best work.

Free Range

Chicago-based singer-songwriter Sofia Jensen, who performs as Free Range, plays in a similar sandbox as Seabird, though their execution is significantly different. Where Seabird’s charms lie in a kind of ramshackle sincerity, Free Range’s new record Lost & Found, sees Jensen harness a muffled, muted beauty, often smeared with a thick layer of discounted restlessness. Like Mendez, there’s a bit of “Miss Misery” in Jensen’s brand of lyricism, a droll specificity that can’t help but strike certain fragile chords. “Asleep inside the ambulance, a stupid joke that you can’t seem to up and quit,” sings Jensen on “Chase” among a layered piano melody.

Elsewhere, Jensen and company (which includes production and accompaniment from Hannah Read of Lomelda) embrace the pop songcraft that runs under the surface of the record. “Big Star,” perhaps a reference to the powerpop band of the same name, is a expansive, twinkly example of Free Range at their Tom Pettiest, with a sweeping harmonica outro betraying the bigger tent that one day may house this Chicago band.

Charlie Cunningham

From Philly to Vermont to Chicago, we now bring you across the pond to find Charlie Cunningham, a singer-songwriter whose latest record In Light has found its way into heavy rotation for me. Cunningham’s fourth record finds the songwriter paring things back further than ever before, removing production and songwriting layers of his past work to embrace something more spare. There’s an almost ghostly quality to the way Cunningham’s vocals bubble from beneath the surface of the record’s ten intricate tracks. That spectral quality extends to the subject matter of a song like “This House,” in which Cunningham sings of reaching out, desperately, for those wandering through, passing otherwise undetected. “a Moment,” which comes toward the album’s back half, is an example of Cunningham paring things back even further, forgoing any percussion in favor of delicate piano and gossamer vocals that brings to mind indie-folk lifers The Antlers. It’s the kind of song, like many of the record, that is all but forcing the listener to lean in for a closer look, quieting the mind in a way that this sort of music can do like no other. (Cunningham brings this stilling atmosphere to the area in June when he plays Ardmore Music Hall with like-minded local Kristin Daelyn.)

Florist

At its best, music can feel like an invitation, a way into a world, an imagination, a feeling you might not be able to muster on your own. For my money, the kind of quiet indie-folk I’ve talked about today, with its tactile nature and the bare exposure of its words and ideas, offers this like no other genre. And within this genre, Florist, a collection of incredibly talented musicians based in upstate New York, might just be doing it better than anyone else. The band’s fifth record, Jellywish, came out just last week on Double Double Whammy, and contains, among other things, some of the most nuanced, heartbreaking, and hopeful songs about grief, love, and the endless battle against despondency you are likely to hear.

Perhaps most impressive is how songwriter Emily Sprague finds a way to tackle massive, universal questions without ever once feeling preachy or unduly equipped with answers. “Should anything be pleasure when suffering is everywhere” sings Sprague on album opener “Levitate”. Later, on “Gloom Designs,” Sprague approaches the question from a different angle, asking if this narrative of anguish and triumph, both personal and universal, is really just a story playing out in her own head and whether any of it is worth holding onto too tightly.

The glue holding together all this existential detritus is both Sprague’s hushed, feathery vocals and the nuanced compositions of a band very clearly in lock step. In 2019, Florist released Emily Alone which, for fear of stating the obvious, was a far more singular effort. Since that time, though, the band – which includes Jonnie Baker, Rick Spataro & Felix Walworth – have become the kind of band for whom collaboration seems second nature, one where even short instrumental asides, like those that wound their way through their 2022 self-titled record, come together with grace. Florist is the kind of band that makes listening to music rewarding and, if you’ve made it this far, I think you might just feel the same. (See Florist live at Johnny Brenda’s on May 5th.)