🎧 Approved: Radie Peat

If you’ve been following Lankum, you’ll already know Radie Peat’s voice. With a richly Irish powerful contralto, she has been one of the most distinctive sounds in contemporary folk for a decade, and her debut solo album ‘No Human Tongue Can Tell’ - out in November - fifteen years in the making, is perhaps the fullest picture.

Opening track and new single ‘Hares On The Mountain’, a folk song learned from Shirley Collins, is a beautifully wry and subversive take on courtship. 

In both Radie’s handling of this song and her curation of references to musical heroes throughout the album, she conveys vignettes of female experiences through the lives they lived and the songs they sang. If The Stranglers had been a folk outfit, this is how they might have done it.

“Communicating hundreds of years of other people’s experiences", Peat says, “binds you with a worldliness beyond the sum of your own experience”. 

Union Chapel in November is sold out. A Barbican date in May has just been announced.

🎧Listen to ‘Hares On The Mountain’ below