Long Live Brown Wimpenny arrives as the first full‑length manifesto from a band who’ve already been behaving like a movement. After early singles “Raglan Road” and “Sheffield Grinder” drew praise from CLASH, The Quietus, KLOF, Rough Trade, Americana UK and BBC Radio 2’s Folk Show, Brown Wimpenny have quietly built a parallel reputation where it really counts: in packed rooms and festival fields. They’ve opened for Andy Irvine, sold out shows in Manchester and London (including a triumphant Hoxton Hall headline), and turned appearances at Green Man, Fire in the Mountain, Cambridge, Sidmouth and Manchester folk festivals into word‑of‑mouth proof that something unusually alive is happening around these songs.

Split between Manchester, London and Liverpool, the group treat traditional music less as heritage material than as a social technology. They mine the “transcendental collective power” of ballads, broadsides and session standards while insisting that this catalogue is owned by no one in particular except, stubbornly, by “humanity itself.” The name Brown Wimpenny itself is a kind of ancestral in‑joke – lifted from a distant 19th‑century relative of tenor banjoist Seth Lockwood – but it also signals a refusal of star‑system hierarchy. This is an 11‑strong band that began as a Sunday jam in Lockwood’s Manchester living room, swelled to 25 players, and only reluctantly condensed when early gigs found them literally taking up half the capacity of the venues they were playing.

Those house‑party origins still shape the album’s ethos. On stage, lyrics are passed around the room, choruses taught on the fly, and the line between performer and audience deliberately blurred; Long Live Brown Wimpenny tries to smuggle that dynamic onto record. You can hear it in the overlapping vocal lines, the way melodies seem designed for massed voices rather than a single spotlight, the sense that any listener might, at any moment, be invited to join in. “We see the band as a shared social and creative endeavour,” explains Anna Korbel. “We love the sense of the everyday and the normal, and rejoicing in the collective and communal. I think that's the key to our process and our ethos. We're not over‑egging anything. We're just seeing it and playing as it is.” The record honours that promise: arrangements are rich but unvarnished, alive to the scrape of strings and the rush of breath.

Part of the thrill is simply hearing how much sound this group can make without losing detail. The current line‑up reads like an entire session scene folded into one outfit: Anna Korbal (vocals, mandolin, trumpet), Archie Barker (mandolin, vocals), Luke Morris (banjo, vocals, bodhrán), Seth Lockwood (tenor banjo, vocals), James Hawdale (drums, vocals), Rory Greig (guitar, vocals), Ted Downer‑Wills (double bass, vocals), James Brown (accordion, vocals, musical saw), Ella Evans (flute, vocals), Chris Bright (violin, vocals), Jess Korbal (violin, vocals, euphonium), Flynn Mchardy (guitar, vocal) and Arthur Bickers (violin, vocals, banjo). On Long Live Brown Wimpenny, these forces are deployed with a keen sense of rise and fall: a song may begin with one voice and a single banjo, then slowly gather mandolin, fiddle, accordion and drums until it crests in a ragged, glorious chorus that sounds less like a band and more like a village.

Released through Broadside Hacks Recordings, the album also plugs into a wider ecosystem of folk‑minded experimentation. Broadside Hacks – the collective, promoter and label founded by Sorry’s Campbell Baum – have made a name by bringing the tradition to new audiences, from sold‑out London nights and shows with The Pogues to festival stages at SXSW and Folk Alliance. Their recent live tributes to The Incredible String Band and Martin Carthy have drawn praise from The Evening Standard, MOJO, UNCUT and The Times; Long Live Brown Wimpenny feels like the next logical step, a document of what happens when those energies are channelled into a single, sprawling group rather than a revolving cast of guests.

The result is a debut that treats “folk” not as a museum category but as an excuse for people to gather, sing, and recognise themselves in stories older than any of them. Long Live Brown Wimpenny is both a title and an invitation: a reminder that this music survives not because it is curated, but because it is sung, loudly and together, in living rooms, back rooms and festival tents wherever people are willing to close the distance between stage and floor.