Tinderbox announces Myer U Clark as a songwriter happiest where things wobble a little. Marking his first album for underground folk champions Broadside Hacks Recordings (home to Sam Grassie, Milkweed and other trad‑adjacent iconoclasts), the Bristol indie/folk artist steps out of the local shadows with a set that treats imperfection as a feature, not a flaw. If the immaculate studio sheen of contemporary indie leaves you cold, Tinderbox offers a different proposition: a collection of songs that feel half like overheard confessions, half like scenes from a film that never quite got made, all held together by Clark’s self‑coined doctrine of “musical jank”.

Lead single “Healers” arrives as the record’s calling card. Built around wiry, slightly skewed guitar figures and delivered in a performance that favours hambling looseness over click‑track rigidity, it embodies Clark’s knack for making songs that sound as if they might fall apart at any moment, even as their internal logic holds tight. Lyrically, it’s a love song about a relationship stuck in a delicious stalemate: two people circling the edge of something serious, acting as a kind of medicine for one another without quite naming the cure. “Healers is a love song describing a back and forth that isn’t going anywhere but both people suspect they could be right on the edge of something special,” Clark explains. “There’s a thread throughout, that the two act as a kind of medicine for one another.”

Musically, “Healers” – and much of Tinderbox – carries the easygoing, slightly sun‑faded charm of the 80s’ homespun indie underground. You can hear glimmers of The Go‑Betweens or Aztec Camera in the jangling chords and conversational melodies, but the songs are also informed by Clark’s quiet study of classic English folk and Delta blues. That mixture surfaces less in purist gestures than in feel: the way a phrase hovers just behind the beat, the way harmonic turns hint at older songforms without tipping into pastiche. Produced at The Crypt by Jack Ogborne (The New Eves, Bingo Fury, The Cindys), “Healers” lands like a lost set piece from the Harold and Maude soundtrack – whimsical, bittersweet, heady in a way that makes the everyday look slightly slanted and full of possibility.

It’s no accident that Clark finds himself more often sharing bills with indie bands than with strict folk traditionalists. A member of art‑rock quartet The Scuttlers, he brings that band’s taste for angles and texture into his solo work, even as the arrangements stay largely acoustic. Recent tour dates with Naima Bock and Sorry, and shows alongside rising names such as Truthpaste, The Slow Country and Morn, position him in a loose network of artists pulling folk structures toward art‑school corners and back‑room venues rather than village halls. Tinderbox sits comfortably in that orbit: intimate enough to hold a room in silence, tuneful enough to be hummed on the walk home, odd enough to resist easy playlisting.