Lucy & Hazel - What Was Stolen

The best English folk music has always faced in two directions: backwards, towards this island’s extraordinary, submerged tradition of radical popular song, and forwards, towards the unfulfilled promise of social and climate justice, gender and racial equality. I can’t think of any folk outfit since the Levellers who combine those two driving forces with as much fire, passion, and raw talent as Lucy Huzzard and Hazel Thompson, a phenomenal young queer feminist folk duo from Sheffield.

Lucy is well known in box-playing circles as one of the country’s best melodeon players and tutors; Hazel brings a crystal-clear voice, rippling guitar and dazzling bursts of clarinet. Their brilliant debut EP, What Was Lost, is easily the best folk record of the year so far.

All five songs on What Was Lost are new compositions by Lucy and Hazel; plenty of songwriters don’t come up with five songs this good in their whole career. Very few songwriters indeed could produce anything like the extraordinary opener Brigid Begrudged, a sinuous and haunting jig about the darkest months of the year, shot through with premonitions of summer. Beautifully played and sung in close harmony, it’s easy to imagine this eerie tune as a highlight of, say, Pentangle’s Cruel Sister or the Watersons’ Frost and Fire.

Waltz of the Wind begins as a deceptively laid-back country-inflected stroll through bee-buzzing meadows, led by Rowan Rheingans’ easy-going banjo, before taking a sharp left turn into anxieties about climate change.

Lucy’s bleak and harrowing Rosemary Kennedy (named after JFK’s elder sister, institutionalized for much of her life after a punitive and unnecessary lobotomy) is the darkest tune on the EP, underpinned by Lucy’s lowering melodeon drone: “She doesn’t fit in the mould we have made her/Let’s melt her down in order to save her/Strap her dissent to a hospital bed”.

But the undoubted highlight of this stunning debut is the glorious Yonder Blue, a triumphant feminist break-up song set to a lovely melody which sounds a thousand years old. The song fades into an exquisitely simple and moving clarinet solo by Hazel, which feels like a beginning rather than the end. This astonishing record is just the start: go buy it now!