Lisa Knapp has long been an exciting folk singer and interpreter, with a range that’s open-hearted and wild, and her husband, Gerry Diver, is an innovative producer working with ease across folk, pop, film and TV. The couple’s first officially collaborative album includes a brilliant, cinematic rendition of the murder ballad “Long Lankin” and a moving, fragile rush through the emotions of Irish ballad “Lass of Aughrim”. Knapp’s spry facility with the fiddle in Monaghan Jig/Monks Jig Set also impresses, as does her spoken-word delivery of travelling snapshots in “Train Song”.
Since her 2007 debut, “Wild and Undaunted“, Londoner Lisa Knapp has blazed an impressive trail at the avant edge of British folk, her bravura vocals lighting up self-penned songs and well-loved standards, while the inventive arrangements of partner and producer Gerry Diver – now credited as co-creator – have helped capture the wyrdness, wonder and darkness of folklore.
On “Hinterland“, the pair repeat the trick to thrilling effect. Opener “Hawk & Crow” has Knapp at her larkish best, giving voice to a cast of birds over a stumbling, broken rhythm – a kind of elfin Tom Waits. The spoken-word “Train Song” relocates us to today’s mundane realities – “poplars tall, village hall, stately home, sewage works” – before “Star Carr” “whisks us back to the Mesolithic Yorkshire site where ritual headdresses of red deer antler hint at ancient raves.
The most transfixing song too few people heard in 2025 has actually been around for nearly 300 years. “Long Lankin”, an insanely violent traditional folk murder ballad, has been performed by musical ghouls since at least the 1750s. Far more recently, its dark soul has been conjured by trad stars as esteemed as Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins and Steeleye Span. Never, however, have I heard a version as bone-chilling as the one by the English folk star Lisa Knapp. (It appears on “Hinterland“, her first album co-credited to her longtime partner in music, life and, for all I know, crime, Gerry Diver). Knapp’s quavering soprano manages to sound, at once, pristine and menacing, a silky ghost of a thing equally skilled at seduction and threat. The clarity of her tone has a Sandy Denny purity, but her vibrato portends imminent danger, underscored by Diver’s creepy-crawly glockenspiel andPete Flood’s spooky drums, which have the jazzy surprise of Terry Cox’s work with Pentangle. While the musicians orchestrate the shifting perspectives of the lyric, Knapp delivers a vocal so arresting, you won’t know whether to shudder or swoon.
Along with intense fiddle playing from Diver, crepuscular instrumentation accompanies a clutch of traditional ballads; the tender romance of “I Must Away Love“, But the murderous “Long Lankin” and the forlorn “Lass of Aughrim“, the last with Knapp in heartbreaking form. She sings carefully throughout but remains unafraid to spill the odd yowl and yelp; you get the whole person. Folk at its most exalted.
The Fat Angel Sings 