I first heard Natalie Wildgoose when listening through all the female artists performing at this year’s Celtic Connections festival and was immediately struck by her beautiful voice and intriguing folk music. The songs on her excellent new EP Rural Hours were recorded while spending time in North Yorkshire, with minimal instrumentation, mainly on pianos she found in different locations, using vintage recording tape to evoke a romantic soundscape of the sublime.
If you’ve ever gone a solitary wander through the open countryside then Nobody on the Path is the perfect musical reflection of that mixture of reverie and awe which you feel. Short and sweet, her voice echoes with the softest of notes that feels like listening to the wind whispering above you.
After that path she takes us alongside the rushing water for the beautiful River Days. On this song she is happy in her rural escape, she doesn’t want to return home, enjoying the endless evenings sleeping out under the stars. The arrangement and vocal delivery has echoes of Laura Marling in the way her voice conveys both intimacy and a sense of wonder.
Sibyl is a slow, eerie song, the closest to the Bronte’s haunted Yorkshire heroines. I was once gifted music / could have wished to be a star / now all that’s left is just a voice / trapped in a little glass jar. Yet somehow this song doesn’t feel dark or dreary – she conveys a sense of relief and freedom in her otherness.
Lovely interlude Wind Callers is a stirring, uplifting moment that could have been something even more, but it fades out softly like the evening light. The final song In the North is an ode to the ‘dark tangled moorland’ she’s been visiting, which sits in contrast with the city she usually calls home. The video was filmed in an empty church and her voice just seems to capture that sense of the divine wonder of music to take us to other places.
Exquisite and delicate at times, and yet there’s strength and much musical comfort here. On Rural Hours Natalie Wildgoose has written a set of songs you want to spend time with.
BUY: https://nataliewildgoose.bandcamp.com/album/rural-hours
Interview: https://klofmag.com/2026/04/off-the-shelf-with-natalie-wildgoose/
Highway Queens 
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