A Folk Album That Goes Where Most Folk Albums Refuse To Go
There is a kind of contemporary folk record that is built to comfort. The chords are gentle, the production foregrounds breath and proximity, and the songs are about specific small moments rendered in beautiful detail. Hannah Frances does not make that record. Her 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd sits in the folk neighborhood by genre default, but the music itself is restless, mournful, and structurally weirder than its surface suggests. The label that fits her better is the one she sometimes uses for herself: avant folk. The avant part is doing real work.
Frances was born in 1997. She grew up in the Chicago area, studied music formally, and spent her early years performing as a vocalist and guitarist in jazz adjacent settings before landing on a sound that pulls in equal parts from progressive rock, Appalachian folk balladry, and the kind of through composed art song that musicians cite when they are reaching back to Joni Mitchell's Hissing of Summer Lawns and Tim Buckley's late records. She is also a poet by training and a movement artist, two facts that show up in the records in ways that are hard to articulate but easy to hear.
What Keeper of the Shepherd Is About
The album took its title from a phrase that recurs through several songs. Frances has said in interviews that the keeper of the shepherd is a figure who watches over the watcher, a kind of guardian behind the guardian, and that idea threads the record together. Many of the songs deal with grief, with the death of her father, and with the slow process of sitting with absence rather than trying to resolve it. Floodplain is the centerpiece. The song builds for over six minutes, opens up into a long instrumental passage that includes electric guitar work that owes something to mid period King Crimson, and lands on a vocal coda that sounds like a hymn delivered in the wrong key on purpose.
Other songs do similar things at smaller scales. Bronwyn moves between fingerpicked passages and full band arrangements without losing the emotional thread. Bicephalic is a song built around the image of a two headed creature trying to walk in a single direction. The lyrics are dense, the imagery comes from old myth and from her own dreams, and the songs reward repeat listening the way good poetry does.
The Production Choices
What separates this record from a lot of contemporary folk is the production. Frances and her collaborators recorded the album with a willingness to let the arrangements grow into something that does not sound like anyone else's folk album. There are passages of pure acoustic intimacy, and there are passages where the band kicks into something close to prog rock fury. The transitions between those modes are not smoothed over. The album asks you to follow the songs through their gear changes.
Daniel Rossen, of Grizzly Bear, contributed to one track on the deluxe edition. Life's Work features his harmony vocals, and his presence is a useful tell for where Frances sits in the contemporary landscape. Rossen's own solo records have been working in similar territory: folk songs that refuse to behave like folk songs, with strange harmonic detours and arrangements that feel composed rather than tracked.
The Slow Build
Frances sits at around 22 thousand monthly listeners on Spotify. That number does not match the critical reception. Keeper of the Shepherd appeared on year end lists from Pitchfork, PopMatters, and a handful of more specialized outlets, and the album has been quietly accumulating attention from musicians who admire it. The discrepancy between the streaming numbers and the critical numbers is the kind of gap that often closes over time, especially for an artist whose songs ask listeners to spend more time with them than the streaming economy normally rewards.
She tours steadily but not heavily. Solo shows at small venues, occasional band dates in the Chicago and New York markets, festival slots at the kind of festivals that book her without trying to fit her into a slot between bigger names. The pace is sustainable, and it is the right pace for the music. Songs like hers do not gain anything from being heard in a stadium. They gain from being heard in a room where the audience can sit with them.
Why The Record Will Outlast The Streaming Cycle
The streaming economy rewards songs that resolve quickly. Hooks within twenty seconds, arrangements that hold a single mood, choruses that you remember after the first listen. Frances writes in the opposite direction. Her songs accumulate. They take their time and they reward the listener who stays with them. That is a structural disadvantage in a market built around skip rates, and it is a long term advantage in the small economy of records that get returned to in five and ten years.
The album is one of the most quietly important records of the last two years, and it is exactly the kind of album that the artonly editorial voice is built for. The records that hold up are not the ones that win the first listen. They are the ones that keep finding new corners of themselves on the fifth and the tenth listen. Keeper of the Shepherd is built to do exactly that work.
What To Listen To First
The doorway tracks are Floodplain, Keeper of the Shepherd, and Bronwyn. Each of them does something different and each of them gives you a way into the record. Frances has also released a live album, Live at Chicago Music Exchange, which captures the songs in a stripped down setting and is a useful companion to the studio record.
If you are someone who has been looking for a folk album that does not sound like every other folk album, this is the one. Hannah Frances writes songs that take grief seriously, that refuse to comfort you on the way through it, and that arrive somewhere unexpected by the end.
