Katherine Priddy: The Pendulum Swing – a comforting throwback to 1960s folk

One of the UK’s most promising folk singer-songwriters of the past five years, Katherine Priddy has earned acclaim and admiration from the likes of Richard Thompson, Elbow’s Guy Garvey and the 1960s folk muse Vashti Bunyan, with whom she shares cultural DNA.

Certainly, Priddy is a comforting throwback to 1960s folk styles, with echoes of Bunyan, Sandy Denny, Pentangle’s Jacqui McShee, Bridget St John and Karen Dalton winding through her songs like leaves in a stream.

The Pendulum Swing is the follow-up to her 2021 debut album, The Eternal Rocks Beneath, and further showcases her maturing skills not only as a songwriter but also the way she digs into a topic until she is able to fully process it. Where the debut featured songs that had been written before she was a teenager, she says she “still can’t help but return to those fundamental, unchanging things at the root of it all: home, family, love”.

A prime example of how well Priddy can reach into the past without tumbling into sentimentality is First House on the Left, which is, she implies, the backbone of the album, a song about not just where she grew up but where previous families arrived, lived and departed. “Is this just the nest that was emptied by war? Or the room where the next generation was born?” she sings.

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Several other songs (including Ready to Go, Leaving, Selah, A Boat on the River and Returning) are just as gorgeous and thoughtful.