Katherine Priddy

Alvechurch, Sussex and a sentence in Mojo

Priddy was born in Birmingham on 9 November 1994 and grew up just south of the city, in the same stretch of country where Nick Drake was raised and is buried. It is a coincidence of geography that has trailed her through most of what has been written about her, and one she has never especially resisted: Drake's Five Leaves Left remains the record she cites first when asked what shaped her, praising an approach in which everything is restrained and subtle but still moving.

She went to South Bromsgrove High School in Alvechurch and then to the University of Sussex to read English literature. The Brighton years brought early support slots, including one opening for Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick. What lifted her out of that circuit was a single line of print: Richard Thompson, writing in Mojo, called her the best thing he had heard all year. Opening slots for Vashti Bunyan, John Smith, The Chieftains and Thompson himself followed.

She has been direct about refusing the packaging that tends to be handed to a young woman singing folk songs. In a 2021 interview she pushed back on the flowery-dress-in-a-field framing and said she would rather be taken as a businesswoman and a musician. She also described how she writes: she hears words before melody, and she does not accept that a good song needs verse, chorus, verse, chorus, preferring to think of a song as a trajectory the listener is taken along.

Two records that set the terms

The Eternal Rocks Beneath arrived on 25 June 2021 on Navigator Records and went to number one on the Official UK Folk Albums Chart on 3 August that year. The Guardian called her a folk prodigy. Its songs — 'Indigo', 'Eurydice', 'Icarus', 'Letters from a Travelling Man', 'A Boat on the River' — still account for roughly a third of what she plays live five years on.

The Pendulum Swing followed in February 2024, this time on Cooking Vinyl and produced by Simon Weaver. It was a record largely about home, and the reception treated it as the sound of a writer consolidating rather than reinventing. She played Later… with Jools Holland in May 2024, and by then had also appeared at the BBC Proms and on the Acoustic Stage at Glastonbury.

The gaps between albums have been filled with work for other people and with other people. She recorded 'Talk to Me of Mendocino' with John Smith in 2022, formed the Nick Drake tribute quartet Slow Jane, and in November 2024 set two commissioned winter poems by the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage to music. In 2025 she supported Suzanne Vega on her UK tour, which put her in front of exactly the audience her writing has always been aimed at.

These Frightening Machines

The third album came out on 6 March 2026 on Cooking Vinyl. It was written across a year in which Priddy moved from her twenties into her thirties, and recorded at The Glaucus House at Middle Farm Studios in rural Devon with Rob Ellis producing — a change of company, given Ellis's history with PJ Harvey, Anna Calvi and Marianne Faithfull. Priddy has described the record as circling the shifting relationship she has with her own sense of self as a woman.

The lead single, 'Matches', draws on the language of the witch trials and the logic behind it: that women were idolised, vilified, accused, controlled or punished according to what was wanted from them at the time. 'Hurricane' arrived with a video in January 2026. Torres duets on 'Madeleine'; Richard Walters duets on 'I'm Always Willing', which George Boomsma co-wrote and plays mandolin and guitar on; Ben Christophers appears across most of the record, and Maddie Cutter adds cello.

The arrangements are the real departure. At The Barrier's review credited Ellis with taking songs presumably written on a solo acoustic guitar and opening them out with electric piano, trumpet, Latin rhythms, cello, mandolin and multitracked vocals, judging Priddy much more confident in her use of a band while wishing a few tracks had been let further off the leash. KLOF Mag called it her most fully realised and sonically evolved work, and argued she is no longer an artist finding her voice. Far Out gave it three and a half out of five and read the distortion and electronics as deliberate rather than decorative. Priddy's own gloss on the record's refusal to resolve: perhaps part of being human is being a perpetual work in progress.

Where things stand in September 2026

Two singles have followed the album. 'The Long Way Home' was released on 29 June 2026, and 'Secrets Still Remain' on 24 July 2026 — the latter written as the theme for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Uncanny Cold Cases, and built on a stormy soundscape that climbs to a climax before fading out on a whisper. Neither belongs to the album, which suggests the Ellis sessions loosened something rather than closed a chapter.

The touring pattern has changed shape too. The spring run of 21 British dates between 16 April and 9 May was the largest of her career, taking in Union Chapel in London on 23 April and finishing at Birmingham Town Hall on 9 May. The autumn has been spent abroad: six Irish dates from 20 to 27 September, then thirteen shows across the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Belgium and Vienna between 1 and 17 October. The year closes on 10–13 December with four English church shows — Bridgnorth, Bruton, Totnes and Bodmin.

The band she now travels with

The most useful measure of where Priddy is as a live act is how much of the new record she is willing to play. At The Stoller Hall in Manchester on 29 April she performed fifteen songs, nine of them from These Frightening Machines — a high proportion for a folk audience that came in knowing 'Indigo' and 'Eurydice'. Four came from the debut and one from The Pendulum Swing.

The shape has held across the run. Manchester opened with 'Frightening Machines' and ended on 'Indigo'; the Birmingham Town Hall show on 9 May followed almost the same order. The duets built into the record get honoured on stage rather than dropped: George Boomsma joined her in Manchester for 'I'm Always Willing', Amelia Coburn came back on for 'Madeleine', and in Birmingham Scott Matthews took the Richard Walters part. The guest list changes town to town, which is a working method rather than an accident.

Support has been drawn from the same circuit rather than from a label roster. Amelia Coburn opened the Manchester date at 7.30pm before Priddy's set began an hour later, and then sang on the main set. The December church dates, in stone rooms with hard reverb and no bar noise, will test the quieter end of the new material in a way the town halls did not.