Concrete Prairie - Concrete Prairie (2022)

To be a great band you need memorable songs, fine musicianship, and a clear idea of what you are doing and Concrete Prairie tick all those boxes with a vengeance. They've been described as 'bruised Americana', and they make use of fiddle, banjo and twanging guitar solos, but this is a distinctively English brand of Americana - in which they tackle anything from London knife crime to the depression of living in a dreary English seaside town in winter. Lead singer and writer Joe describes the band as "socially conscious, aware of the world around us, and not afraid to go down a Country-Folk avenueor to rock out".

His subject matter reflects his own, often pained experiences growing up in a single-parent family, with his mother losing her life to alcoholism "so I'm acutely aware of how fragile the whole thing isand then embracing it from there". So the sturdy Bury My Blues, which deals with mental health issues, starts as an acoustic ballad before developing into a stomping, fiddle-backed celebration of life. Wine On My Mind is influenced by the problems that faced his mother, and all other addicts "and just jumping into their shoes for a song. Thinking about how it must feel for them". And that, says bandmate Adam, is a key part of his technique "because it's easy to write a song about the devastating impact of these sort of things, but it's a lot harder to take another person's point of view, taking it from their side and how they must be feeling". Adam-penned Winter Town fits the mood perfectly with its atmospheric story of an out-of-season English resort, depression and suicide.

Concrete Prairie are Joe Faulkner, lead singer, guitarist and harmonica player, second songwriter Adam Greeves on vocals , guitar, mandolin and harmonica, and Dan Burrows, who adds harmonies, and plays bass and banjo. Then there's Georgia Browne on fiddle and Tom Hartley on drums. And why are they called Concrete Prairie? "It's English but with the influence of Americana. The brutalism of a city combined with the image of a prairie..."