Where the Stories Still Matter: Folk Music’s Living Breathing Year of 2025

Folk music in 2025 doesn’t knock politely. It walks right in, boots dusty, hands calloused, carrying stories that smell like rain on wood and late-night confessionals. This isn’t nostalgia cosplay. It’s a living language—ancient, modern, and stubbornly human. Somewhere between the crackle of a vinyl record and the glow of a phone screen, folk music has found itself again, and this year’s artists are proving the genre isn’t surviving—it’s thriving.

You can feel it in the quiet authority of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, whose Woodland feels less like an album and more like a testament. These are songs carved, not written, shaped by patience and restraint. In a year obsessed with speed, they remind us that folk has always been about time—how it bends, how it heals, how it haunts.

That same reverence for space and silence pulses through Gregory Alan Isakov, whose songs continue to feel like letters you weren’t meant to read but somehow needed. His pastoral intimacy still carries weight in 2025, proof that subtlety hasn’t lost its power. Meanwhile, Bonny Light Horseman lean into the genre’s shared memory, stitching old melodies into modern cloth, sounding both communal and deeply personal.

Across the Atlantic, The New Eves are tearing polite folk traditions apart with violin strings and punk defiance. Their music doesn’t ask permission; it reclaims folk as protest, as sweat, as something unruly and alive. That same tension between tradition and disruption surfaces in the work of Big Thief, whose sprawling emotional landscapes refuse genre boundaries altogether. Folk, indie, rock—it all dissolves into feeling.

Elsewhere, voices like Zoé Basha and Avery Friedman are reminding listeners that folk doesn’t need grand gestures to land a punch. Basha’s voice carries old-world gravity, while Friedman’s Brooklyn-born intimacy makes the everyday feel monumental. These are songs that don’t shout; they linger.

In the heartland, Caamp and the Michigan Rattlers keep folk tethered to the road—music built for movement, for long drives and longer conversations. Their work doesn’t romanticize where they’re from; it honors it. The same can be said for Susan Werner and Crys Matthews, whose songwriting blends intelligence, conscience, and soul, proving that folk music remains one of the most effective vessels for social reflection.

Bob Augustine is one of the newer voices—quiet, deliberate, devastating in his honesty. His songs don’t posture; they observe. There’s a plain-spoken gravity to his writing that recalls the tradition of folk as lived experience rather than performance. Augustine isn’t chasing relevance; he’s documenting reality, one carefully chosen line at a time.

That commitment to authenticity also defines Ken Holt, whose 2025 output continues to blur the lines between folk and Americana. Holt writes with the patience of someone who understands that the best songs don’t arrive fully formed—they earn their shape. His music feels rooted, grounded in family, memory, and the long view.

A different kind of grit emerges from Baldy Crawlers, a band that understands folk isn’t always gentle. Their sound carries the scrape of boots on barroom floors, the tension of lived-in nights, and the poetry that only comes from experience. They lean into folk’s raw edge, where melody meets muscle.

On the more introspective side of the spectrum, Alex Krawczyk continues to build her world quietly and intentionally. Her songs don’t demand attention—they invite it. There’s a meditative quality to her writing that aligns folk with healing, reflection, and emotional clarity, offering listeners a space to breathe.

Beyond them, artists like Henhouse Prowlers carry folk traditions across borders, while Yaelokre and August Ponthier stretch the genre into multimedia, identity-driven storytelling that feels distinctly of this moment. Alex Amen adds Laurel Canyon warmth to modern narratives, and The Lumineers, for all their scale, continue to prove that folk music can be both intimate and enormous.

What binds all of these artists together isn’t style or geography—it’s intent. Folk music in 2025 is unified by a shared understanding that songs still matter, that stories still carry weight, and that truth—messy, unresolved, human truth—is worth chasing.

This isn’t a revival. Folk never left. It just waited for the world to listen again.

–Lonnie Nabors