Folk music doesn’t need saving. But every so often someone comes along and reminds you why it mattered in the first place.

Ervin Munir is that someone. “When I Think,” his third album, is out now and it’s the sound of a songwriter who has stopped worrying about what anyone thinks and just made the record he needed to make. You can hear it in every track. The lack of compromise. The refusal to smooth the rough edges down.

Norfolk’s folk scene doesn’t exactly dominate the cultural conversation, but Munir has spent his career quietly building something real while everyone else was busy chasing algorithms. Eleven tracks of emotional piano folk that shifts and breathes and occasionally picks up a guitar and rocks out just enough to remind you it could floor you if it wanted to.

“Lifeline” opens the record with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. “Rainfall Memories” will stop you mid-listen, guaranteed. “I Don’t Care” has a looseness that most songwriters spend their whole careers pretending to have. “One Step Beyond” builds to something genuinely unexpected. And the title track sits at the centre of everything like a quiet, necessary truth.

There’s also something heavier underneath all of this. The album is dedicated to Aeron Z Jones, Munir’s producer and close friend, who passed away recently. Knowing that doesn’t just add context. It reframes the entire record. These songs feel like they were kept alive by grief and love in equal measure and that presence is felt on every single track.

You can listen here.