The finest folks Free Press recommendations on whose sets folkies should check out By: Eva Wasney, Ben Waldman, Jen Zoratti, Jill Wilson, Rob Williams Posted: 5:12 PM CDT Monday, Jul. 6, 2026

When Shishi took the stage in Clearwater last fall for its first-ever Manitoba performance, the Lithuanian band wasn’t expecting such an enthusiastic reception.

“It was a really pleasant surprise. Like, ‘Wow, what the hell is happening?’” drummer Kamile Griusyte (a.k.a. Benadetta) says of headlining the 2025 Harvest Moon Festival, a small rural music fest 7,000 kilometres from her Lithuanian home.

“It was hard to believe. How can you be so excited, we don’t even know each other? But they were all dancing and it’s so cool when people dance to your music, I loved it,” bassist Dominyka Krisciunaite (a.k.a Victoria) adds over video call.

The crowd response was so strong, in fact, that Shishi’s local label, Birthday Cake Records, lined up a last-minute show at Blue Note Park following the festival. The event sold out in hours and resulted in a live EP.

The three-piece surfy post-punk group returns this week for a Friday night set at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. They’re looking forward to playing for a larger audience and reuniting with their newfound Canadian fanbase, whom they describe as “extremely nice” and “cute,” with a “great sense of humour.”

“It makes me curious, what will happen this time. The bar is high,” says guitarist Meda Kaunaite (a.k.a Teresa).

“We just play around. We’re just being ourselves, man.”

When Shishi formed in 2018, its members adopted Italian personae as a joke — a deadpan nod to Italy’s “southern energy” and its contrast with the band’s cooler (in temperature and temperament) Baltic roots. While the faux Italian accents faded, the stage names — Victoria, Benadetta and Teresa — stuck.

For Shishi, making music is not so serious.

The band’s current roster has been playing together for two years. Krisciunaite and a friend started jamming casually in a shared studio in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, and recruited a third member over bowls of soup. At the time, none of them knew how to play their instruments.

In the eight years since, the band has recorded three albums and a handful of EPs, including the brand-new release, Queen Deyonna (annoyed spelled backwards).

Onstage, the members dress up like mermaids born of the Baltic Sea — glitter, iridescence and sequins — and deliver a sound that melds the grooviness of surf rock with the scrappiness and ideology of punk. But genre is a fluid thing.

“We all sing. There’s harmonies, there’s influences from this and that. We just play around. We’re just being ourselves, man,” Kaunaite says.

“There were never frames in which we put ourselves. I hope, still, that if we wanted to play a metal song, we could play a metal song,” Krisciunaite adds.

Birthday Cake Records CEO Stu Anderson stumbled upon Shishi while on vacation in Budapest. He was immediately impressed by the band’s music and stage presence.

“The show was on a boat docked on the Danube River, Shishi came on and nearly blew the hull right out of it,” Anderson says via email.

“They are gifted musicians, pull no punches with their lyrics, and are just a genuinely fun, cool band. The more we got to know them, the more we knew we wanted to help tell their story.”

Catch Shishi Friday at 8:15 p.m. at Big Blue at Night.

— Eva Wasney

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Musical discovery is a central tenet of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, which takes place Thursday through Sunday at Birds Hill Provincial Park. Keep reading for a round-up, curated by Free Press staff, of acts playing the festival for the first time.

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Angine de Poitrine

● Friday, 11:05 p.m., Big Blue at Night (concert)

The Quebecois instrumental math-rock duo is having a major moment for their weird, technically complex but highly danceable soundscapes — and you can say you saw them when.

In February, the group’s 2025 Live on KEXP session recorded at the Trans Musicales festival in France went viral, racking up millions of views.

By April, the two-piece hit No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 Global chart with the song Fabienk — six minutes of squiggly, skittering guitars backed by a propulsive beat from the sophomore album Vol. II — that has since been streamed more than 12 million times.

And then, last week, the band drew a record crowd at the Montréal International Jazz Festival with a free outdoor show that drew an estimated 70,000 people.

Like lineup mates Goat, there’s an aura of mystery around Angine de Poitrine. The musicians obscure their identities with giant papier-mâché masks and polka-dot outfits — think a Marcel Dzama painting come to life — and perform under pseudonyms Khn de Poitrine (microtonal guitar/bass) and Klek de Poitrine (drums).

Secure your spot near the front of the stage early; this is, hands down, one of the hottest draws at the festival.

— Jen Zoratti

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Brìghde Chaimbeul

● Friday, 11:15 a.m., Instrumental Overdrive (workshop)

● Saturday, 11:30 a.m. Forbidden Frequencies (workshop)

● Saturday, 4:15 p.m., Little Stage in the Forest (concert)

● Sunday, 11 a.m., Pipes, Picks & Psychotropics (workshop)

Nobody at folk fest will have pipes like Brìghde Chaimbeul — and we’re not talking about her voice.

The 27-year-old artist from the Isle of Skye does sing in Gaelic on her ambient, thrumming 2025 record Sunwise, but most of the buzz for Chaimbeul (pronounced Hime-bowl) is because of her ability to mystify audiences through her command of the Scottish smallpipes.

Unlike traditional bagpipes, the smallpipes are filled and emptied by an underarm bellows and controlled by fingerplaying on an upright chanter; a gentle, constant drone is the foundation for endlessly dynamic, hugely folkloric tunecraft drawn straight from the Scottish highlands.

Over the past several years, Chaimbeul, whose study of piano and fiddle informs her harmonic tendencies, has opened ears to the transportative potential of windsong, drawing inspiration from global piping traditions sourced from her native land, from Scandinavia, and Canada’s east coast.

Though her most frequent collaborator is avant-garde sax composer Colin Stetson, with whom she’ll tour this fall, Chaimbeul has also had some crossover success, contributing instrumentals to pop singer Caroline Polachek’s 2023 album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.

Expect electrifying ambient soundscapes, jiggable melodies and an ASMR-like tingle in your Birkenstocked toes.

— Ben Waldman

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Goat

● Saturday, 3 p.m., Big Bluestem Stage, Day Tripping (workshop)

● Saturday, 11 p.m., Big Blue at Night (concert)

Hailing from Gothenburg, Sweden, Goat is a mysterious, masked septet that offers a kaleidoscopic mix of tribal rhythms, global fusion, warped disco, acoustic folk, krautrock, funk, Afropop, desert surf, hard rock, trance, hip hop and experimental psychedelia.

It’s a genre-hopping musical trip that pays no heed to boundaries or borders.

According to the mythology (real or not) put forth by the anonymous group, the band originally hails from a small voodoo-worshipping town named Korpilombolo in northern Sweden and is one of many incarnations that has played together over the past 30 years.

What can be verified is the band has released six full-length albums since its debut, World Music, in 2012, including its latest self-titled effort, which came out in 2024.

The group tours sporadically and selectively, so the chance to witness Goat’s musical madness live is a rare treat.

— Rob Williams

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Empanadas Ilegales

● Friday, 1:15 p.m., Big Bluestem Stage (concert)

● Friday, 4:15 p.m., Big Bluestem Stage, Cumbia Beats and Illegal Treats (workshop)

● Saturday, 4:15 p.m., Green Ash Stage, Cumbia Cosmica (workshop)

This Vancouver-based ensemble’s most recent album, Sancocho Trifasico, is named for a Colombian stew that blends meats, starchy vegetables and aromatics into a tasty dish.

The band takes that same approach to music, combining South American cumbia and salsa, and then adding a pinch of psychedelia and a shake of surf rock to make a unique flavour.

Featuring members with roots in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Canada, the quintet — nominated for Instrumental Artist of the Year and Global Artist of the Year at the 2026 Western Canadian Music Awards — uses horns, synths, guitars, bass and a whole lotta percussion for an improvisational take on tradition that’s sure to fill the fields at Birds Hill with writhing bodies.

It’s a total trip you can dance to.

— Jill Wilson