There is folk that wants to whisper in your ear, and then there is the music of Lankum: urgent, desperate and detonating, full of lyrics and sounds smacking together like waves shattering stones in a storm. The latest folk signing to Rough Trade Records (a label delving brilliantly into traditional song in recent years), the quartet – formerly known as Lynched – marry the rawness of the Watersons with the roar of Richard Dawson, and eerie drones plunge their coarse, clattering harmonies further into darkness. What Will We Do When We Have No Money? is a particularly startling opener, Radie Peat’s vocals loading the Irish Traveller song with the impacts of poverty and pain. Anti-fascist anthem Peat Bog Soldiers feels similarly urgent about the terrors of our own times, while Lankum’s own compositions connect too. Ian Lynch’s Déanta in Éireann, about Irish emigration, and The Granite Gaze are particularly hard to shift from the mind. Lankum inhabit a harsh, uncomfortable world, but a vital one.
