These are listening notes rather than scored reviews. We start with two recent Belgian albums, and more will follow once each new record has had plenty of time on the turntable.
Tamino: Every Dawn’s a Mountain (2025)
Every Dawn’s a Mountain is Tamino’s third album, following Sahar from 2022. He is a Belgian-Egyptian singer. Much of this set was sketched after he moved to New York, and the recording moved between that apartment, a church in New Orleans, a studio in Brussels, and rooms on tour. He has called the record an altar to loss. The pace matches the phrase. The songs do not hurry the feeling they are holding.
Guitar and Arabic oud lead the arrangements, with his longtime collaborator PJ Maertens. “My Heroine,” the opener, stays close to a single acoustic guitar. “Babylon” begins in that same quiet and then opens. “Raven” uses vocal turns that tie the record to his Egyptian heritage. The title track brings in a sample of a Belgian choir singing an old Flemish polyphonic piece, then settles back to a plucked guitar. “Dissolve” is the long centre, a song that holds one picture until the arrangement has to grow. Mitski sings on “Sanctuary.” The two voices answer each other rather than blend into one.
Play this when you want song-first music that is not pretending to be a cabin in another country. The folk element is the guitar and the narrative pace. The rest is oud, choir, and a city apartment. If the record holds you, the credits are the next map: the players, then the rooms in Belgium where a bill like this fits. Our venues guide can help with that part.
The Bony King of Nowhere: Everybody Knows (2024)
Everybody Knows was released on 2 February 2024 by Unday Records. It is the sixth album under the name The Bony King of Nowhere, the project of Belgian songwriter Bram Vanparys. More than five years sit between this record and Silent Days, from 2018. He has talked about a long stretch in which new songs would not come, and about refusing to repeat the previous album once they did.
You can hear that refusal. Several songs were written on piano rather than on the guitar shapes of earlier work. The band leaves room for small accidents: guitar from Vitja Pauwels, drums from Simon Segers, bass from Jasper Hautekiet, and piano and arrangement ideas from Hendrik Lasure. The subject stays ordinary on purpose. Notes around the album point to social habits, the performance of agreement, and the noise of being online. It is not a pastoral folk record. It is a songwriter record that still belongs in this company, because the voice and the band keep a lyric intelligible while the arrangement gets stranger.
“Are You Still Alive” and “Almost Invisible” are fair first plays if you do not want to start at the top. Then hear the title song and let the piano decide whether you stay. The release run included a date at AB in Brussels, which is a sensible scale for it: enough room for a five-piece band, and still a vocal-led night.
What to do with the next record
When you put on something new, listen once for the voice and once for who else is in the room. Note the instrument that carries the song when the guitar drops out. Note whether the lyric is telling a story or building a mood. Then decide if you want to hear it with other people. That last question is the one that sends you back to a venue calendar.
A fuller version of that first pass is in what to notice on a first listen. If you are looking for artists rather than one record, start with discovering indie-folk artists. New reviews are added as we spend time with more records.