It’s been a period of upheaval and change for singer-songwriter, and compelling interpreter of traditional ballads, Josienne Clarke. These days she’s a Rough Trade artist, now sailing solo seas away from her long-time musical partner, producer and arranger Ben Walker.

If you’ve been paying attention, you might have already heard most if not all of Bon Iver’s curiously named i,i album – weeks before its physical release on August 30. The band debuted two tracks (“Hey Ma” and “U (Man Like)”) at London’s All Points East festival back in June, and since then they’ve been dropping videos, teasers, singles and unrelased tracks all over the place.

As a recent exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland showed, attempting to tell the history of Scottish popular music in an afternoon – or on one single album – is no mean feat.

Josh Ritter is in his early forties. He has a two-decade career with 10 studio albums (and, incidentally, a First World War novel) to his name. He has come a long way from trying out open mic nights in Providence, Rhode Island. His albums now regularly make it into the upper reaches of the US folk charts. But he still exudes a boyish charm, a winning and willing smile and obvious enthusiasm for live performing.

It’s a rare thing that musicians sound better live than they do on Spotify. But Florence Welch sings a note perfect set – even when jumping up and down like a pogo stick, whirling and spinning, or sprinting along the front of the stage to meet fans.

Although British folk-jazz stylists Pentangle played their first official concert in May 1967, their name is borrowed for the title of Unpentangled, a box set of their guitarist John Renbourn’s work on album which kicks off two years earlier.

Earlier this year, eight musicians – Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Kerry Andrew, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and Jim Molyneux – set about working with the ‘spell songs’ of nature writer Robert Macfarlane and the images from nature of artist Jackie Morris, and recorded what they created at Rockfield studios, then performed four sell-out shows to stan

Who would have thought that Ari Aster could top the satanic delights of Hereditary? Yet with Midsommar, a psychedelic twist on folk horror, he has. Aster abandons the supernatural to show that it’s not things that go bump in the night that scare us, it’s other people.

Endlessly gigging Northern Irish performer Foy Vance's profile first rocketed after touring with fellow singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran. The pair became pals, Vance went onto support the likes of Elton John, and signed to Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man Records. His fourth album is the first of a themed couple paying tribute to the southern US roots of popular music (the other will hail from Sam Phillips Studios in Memphis).

The Barbican Hall hardly boasts the numinous acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral for which Vaughan Williams composed his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, but Sir Simon Rattle has long known how to build space into the architecture of what he conducts.