Talks & Entertainment

Shannon Carey, the woman behind Luray, is a banjo player, singer, and songwriter, but the music she’s created for her debut album, The Wilder, moves the banjo into uncharted territory. You could call it ambient folk or electrograss, but the sound doesn’t fit easily into established categories. With the help of her brother Sean (S. Carey of Bon Iver), she’s produced an album that confounds expectations with its ambient, cinematic sweep.

The Wilder creates strange and lovely bedfellows of sound – banjos, vibes, pedal steel, and ambient vocals make up this once bluegrass-picking songwriter’s newly roused approach to making music. The end result is somewhere between the likes of Iron & Wine and Emmylou Harris.

DC/Baltimore-based Kindlewood who combines lush fingerstyle guitar, scattered percussion, and haunting, ethereal, female vocals to create the group’s unique “dream folk- rock.”