BMAs // Folk
A guide to the 2024 Boston Music Awards
The 2024 Boston Music Awards is at Big Night Live on December 11.
Hump Day News was nominated for Best Music Publication.
You can vote for all the nominees here.
To honor our glorious symbolic inclusion and insufferable clout chasing, we’re rolling out the BMAde Betterz series for 2024. In this series we send the nominees through the meat grinder to yield three main categories of sodium-enriched meat byproducts.
The “New To Us”
Never heard of them, or at least never heard them. But they’re on the list, so let’s have a listen.
The “House Specials”
We’ve covered these acts, we treasure these acts, we 100% get why they’ve been nominated.
The “New To You”
These artists didn’t make the list, but they should have!
Folk Artist of the Year // Nominees
Alisa Amador // Cloudbelly // Izzy Heltai // Naomi Westwater // Noah Kahan // Rachel Sumner // Sweet Petunia // Tall Heights // The Ballroom Thieves // Tiny The Bear
Cloudbelly, folk straight outta Montague. Love the Book Mill! Their new album i know i know i know is great music for sipping a craft IPA next to a waterfall. And how tall is the folk duo Tall Heights? It’s hard to tell from press photos, but this Instagram video, showing them in proportion to a van door, suggests they are about average height. New album Softly Softly dropped in October.
Naomi Westwater has been a presence in the folk scene for years, and we caught her live at We Black Folk fest at Club Passim way back in February (is that happening again in 2025?). Which was awesome, but we’ve also got to shout out this old nugget: a contribution to A Very Allston Christmas Vol. 6. Perfect for the holiday season. #xmas4eva
The duo Sweet Petunia seem to be everywhere at once, hitting big fests and small stages all at the same time. Their deep and passionate commitment to Dolly Parton finally finds physical embodiment in their latest release, the five-track tape Sweet Petunia Does Dolly, available at Bandcamp. And Hump Day News covered its first Tiny the Bear show at Midway Cafe in September, with the trio of guitar, fiddle, and saxophone (sometimes accordion!) spinning out tunes full of earnest and oddball musings.
Wallace Field’s All Costs brings a pop instinct to indie folk. There’s a little country in her voice as well. The album is a real grower. The kind of CD you pop into your car’s stereo, and never hit the eject button, just vibing on all the little worlds that Field has built, while you run to the store to pick up eggs for months.