Chicago vocalist, guitarist and composer Hannah Frances followed up her breakout album in 2024 Keeper of the Shepherd, which put forward a set of eerie and baroque progressive folk tunes. With the help of Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear (and perhaps inspired by Rossen’s 2022 album You Belong There), Nested In Tangles expands further on the sound with complex tangled rhythms and stormy arrangements, full of Pentangle style contorted acoustic riffs and often accompanied by dissonant saxophone.
Nested In Tangles opens with a discordant progressive rock section with whirring saxophones and ghastly humming before pounding drums enter creating a King Crimson level fervor. The pretentious spoken word section however saps the potential. She weds her signature dizzying folk guitar work to a Fiona Apple-esque musichall ballad on Life’s Work, which is both melodic and intensely nervous and eerie. Falling From and Further however is closer to the calm folk rock of Crosby, Stills and Nash despite the brief accelerations and decelerations that scatter throughout the track with a progressive bluegrass quality. Beholden To is a dense interlude of hypnotic guitar arpeggios.
The second half begins with the slow, sentimental ballad for solo guitar Steady In the Hand harks back to Richard Thompson’s depressive litanies, which spotlights her eerie vocal quality.
A Body, A Map is a brief mathy interlude of spiralling folk guitar which sets up the stormy and anguished Surviving You with noisy feedback guitar and overdubbed vocals. The Space Between (featuring Daniel Rossen) resides on arpeggiated guitar and a theatrical performance before some more tedious spoken word.
The album brings together the worlds of American folk music and British theatre. The performances are anxious and obtuse while the atmospheres are dense and eerie. Some tracks are rhythmically obtuse enough to belong to a new genre, ‘Math-Folk’, alongside what feels like its brother album, Daniel Rossen’s You Belong There. The Fiona Apple influence, which was far less obvious on the previous album also rises to the fore. The album could be more eclectic but overall product is still compelling.
Label: Fire Talk
Released: October 10, 2025
Losing My Edge Rating: 7/10
Best Tracks: Surviving You, Steady in the Hand