There is a moment on The New Faith where a prayer gives way to a rap verse, and it does not feel like a stunt. That is the whole trick of Jake Blount's second full-length: the seams between 1850 and 2150 have been sanded down until you stop noticing which century you are standing in.
Blount, born in Washington, DC in 1995 and now based in Providence, came to old-time music as a scholar first. He studied ethnomusicology at Hamilton College, and his 2020 debut Spider Tales, released on Free Dirt Records with Tatiana Hargreaves on fiddle and Nic Gareiss on percussive dance, was built from Black and Indigenous sources in the Appalachian repertoire, named after the Anansi stories that survived the Middle Passage. It earned him the Steve Martin Banjo Prize the same year and a reputation as the most rigorous of the new Black string-band players.
The New Faith, out on Smithsonian Folkways in September 2022, is where the rigour turns into fiction. The frame is a religious service held by Black refugees in a climate-wrecked future, and the material is almost entirely traditional: Take Me to the Water, Didn't It Rain, City Called Heaven and the warning that is Just as Well Get Ready, You Got to Die. What has changed is the setting. Blount and co-producer Brian Slattery stack fiddle and banjo over synthesizer drones, drum machines and electric guitar, and the effect is less fusion than weathering, as if the songs had been left outside for a hundred years and picked up again.
The cast makes it a congregation rather than a solo record. Rissi Palmer, Kaïa Kater, Lizzie No and Mali Obomsawin sing on it; the North Carolina rapper Demeanor delivers the verses that snap the record into the present tense; D'orjay The Singing Shaman and Samuel James add voices from country and blues that rarely share a room. Parts were cut at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, other parts in bedrooms and a shed, which suits a story about worship in whatever building is left standing.
The point of view is unmistakably Blount's own. As a queer Black musician in a genre that has spent decades pretending he was not there, he treats the archive as something to argue with, not curate. Death Have Mercy and Once There Was No Sun land as warnings, not comfort. And the mentorship of Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer, the bluegrass duo he credits as guides, shows in the plainness of the singing: no melisma, no museum reverence, just the words.
The record opened a door he has kept walking through. In September 2024 he and Obomsawin released symbiont on the same label, a duo record the two of them produced and recorded at their homes, pushing further into a folklore written for the future. But The New Faith remains the clearer statement, a reminder that the spirituals were always apocalyptic literature. Blount simply took them at their word.
