Cinder Well

Originally from Los Angeles, Amelia Baker makes music under the name Cinder Well that is less bleak than its reputation for doomy folk suggests. Her sound strips traditional forms down to their bones, building meditative, trance-like spaces where her voice does the heavy lifting. Working from County Clare, where she moved to study the region's traditional music, she treats the Irish pub session as a model of musical connection. The result sits between dark folk and indie folk, shaped by a tension between worlds and histories rather than by despair.

Her path ran through the Irish pub circuit, where time spent touring with the trad-punk group Lankum, and her membership of the anarchist folk project Blackbird Raum, led her to a small settlement in County Clare. Her self-titled album Cinder Well appeared in 2015, followed by The Unconscious Echo in 2018. No Summer, released in 2020 on Free Dirt Records and recorded by Nich Wilbur, pairs original songs with careful reworkings of Appalachian material, and its title track presaged a season of cancelled shows. Later releases include the EP I Am a Youth That's Inclined to Ramble (2022), Cadence (2023) and A Blooming Body (2026).