The Rheingans Sisters

Friday 15th August 2025
#PVFF25

The Rheingans Sisters’ new album ‘Start Close In’, was released in September 2024 to enthusiastic critical acclaim. Celebrated at #2 in The Guardian’s Top 10 Albums of 2024, “it’s clear that the Rheingans Sisters have made their boldest album yet”. MOJO Magazine gave the sisters “joyous” album #5 in their Top 10 Folk Albums of 2024 round up and Trad Folk described it as “experimental and brave and genuinely magical”.

Produced by New York based Adam Pietrykowski (whose genre-diverse work spans rock, contemporary classical and prog folk) the visionary duo’s new album is “wildly expressive; at the forefront of the recent upsurge in experimental, drone-led folk” (KLOF).

The sisters’ new live show is an immersive and uplifting musical journey. Taking in baroque fiddle tunes and trance beats, metal-inspired arrangements of traditional ballads and improvisations with phone voicenotes, Rowan and Anna once again make music like painters; revealing in bold colours the next soaring chapter in their unmistakable brand of avant-garde trad, blending ancient song and universal stories with future imaginings, dystopias and dreams.

Previous winners of BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for ‘Best Original Track’ and nominees for ‘Best Band’, with their uniquely blended sound of fiddles, voices, feet, banjos, electric guitar, synths and the powerful bass drones of the medieval tambourin à cordes, The Rheingans Sisters remain one of the most visionary acts on the British folk scene today.

 

“A radical leap into darkness” – The Guardian, Folk Album of the Month

“Brilliant complexity and sparkling diversity” – Folk Radio UK

“Gorgeous, vivid songwriting” – Mark Radcliffe, BBC Radio 2 Folk Show

“Experimental and brave and genuinely magical” – Trad Folk

The Rheingans Sisters image. A close up portrait image of the two sisters. Both women are wearing lipstick, multiple earrings, and have brown / auburn coloured hair with fringes. They are both looking directly into the camera.