Braden Lam meets the moment on The Cloudmaker’s Cry, an album that makes good on the promise of this indie-folk wunderkind, with music reminiscent of a bygone era set to lyrics pulsing with the urgency and anxiety of today. The titular Cry evokes many kinds—cries of joy, of sorrow, of protest, of rage, of grief—as Lam pushes his voice to new edges exploring these expressions, and then some. He hones in and drills down on the complexity of relationships, the mundanity of adulthood, and the lasting impact of history. The Cloudmaker’s Cry is available April 11, 2025.

 

Across Halifax Harbour, not far from Lam’s home in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, is a thermal power station called Tufts Cove. Its three smokestacks, painted in alternating stripes of red and white, climb 500 feet above the ocean. On a clear day, the stacks pump out plumes of white steam from their boiler rooms, drifting toward Halifax and out to the sea. A realist knows they’re harmful emissions, but a dreamer sees the city’s landmark as a single cloud factory. Lam imagines that factory’s blue-collar workers struggling to build a good life in a city that makes it harder every day.

The factory may be imaginary, but the reality certainly is not. 

 

The Cloudmaker’s Cry is Lam’s debut full-length album, and he means album in the classic sense: 10 considered and thoughtful folk songs, meticulously arranged and painstakingly sequenced, meant to be played on a turntable in a single sitting, whiskey optional. Though barely 27, he has lived the life of a much older man—with years of touring, entrepreneurship, and marriage already accounted for—and this collection of songs reflects lessons learned earlier than most, about time and love and the world.

 

It was produced in Toronto by Eli Browning, a new approach for Lam, who made his previous three EPs with a host of producers across Atlantic Canada. The pair’s touchstones as they worked through a city springtime in a converted church studio were George Harrison, Neil Young, and other sounds from the 1960s and 70s: music that is lyric-forward and performed with folk instrumentation in analogue tones, resulting in a timeless singer-songwriter record.

 

This vibe carries through the entire package, from the tintype photographs of Lam to the images wrought in 35mm in the liner notes, to his charming video collaborations with Griffin O’Toole that combine nostalgia, surrealism, and camp into a distinct style of film. Each particular piece fits perfectly into the primary vision, creating something grand in its authenticity and comforting in its warmth.

 

The Cry starts softly with the gentle, piano-driven love song “The Hold,” an ode to his wife: “You’re an island of everyone I missed.” “In The Narrows” dips into history—its title a reference to the harbour passageway where two ships collided, causing the Halifax Explosion in 1917—and reframes it as a contemporary call to action, picking up instruments and intensity as Lam laments global destruction at the hands of the one percent: “If we all retreat history repeats / don’t take this world from me.” That dovetails immediately with the urgent, driving “Hurricane Season,” as ferociously bowed violin lurks underneath anxious climate fears (“I lock my door and I hope for the best”). 

 

Cloudmaker’s middle section cruises onwards, exploring both mortality and desire on “Cowboy Boots” (a duet with his wife Lassie Fai) and “Highway Jesus”: “Is this how it ends / no light in the sky to swallow me up”. The soulful, woodwind-tinged “Beautiful Neighbourhoods” sees Lam retracing his ancestral steps in Germany, reconnecting 

with the places and culture his grandparents left behind to start a new life in Canada.

 

Its closing stretch is the album’s most deeply indebted to classic country. “Wide Open,” a duet with Michaela Slinger, is a heartbreaker in the Plant & Krauss way, detailing a hard time in a relationship on which Lam regrets, and repents: “If you wanna try to forgive / I’ll be your window in the morning / Crack me wide open.” The verses of “Bigger Flame” are guided by a slowly plucked banjo crashing into a climax of strings and pedal steel. “Obsolete” features a guitar line out of Laurel Canyon but our setting is Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, once a key shipping stop and now a tourist destination selling history instead of creating it. On the final track, “Sore,” Lam considers the perspective of the child he and his wife will never have in the wake of health issues—an elegy that boils over with those cries of rage and grief: “I’m so sore / I’m sorry to see you go.”

 

A fully realized vision delivered with atypical wisdom and maturity, The Cloudmaker’s Cry sees Lam with his feet on the ground and his gaze tilted skyward, voice lifted to the wind.