John Francis Flynn is monumentally good. He’s kick-yourself-for-missing-him good. He’s so good that when he spoke between songs in the upstairs ballroom of an old Irish pub in Tufnell Park, it was almost a disappointment: how could the man making this extraordinary music be so normal?

Flynn is part of a cohort of Irish musicians revisiting traditional music. There’s the Mary Wallopers, in broad terms the most Pogues-ish. There’s Lankum, shortlisted for the Mercury Prize for their eyebrow-raising, droning experimentalism. There’s Lisa O’Neill, subdued and stern. And there’s Flynn, whose music dances from the unadornedly old-fashioned and Irish – the ‘Tralee Gaol’ played solo, on tin whistle – into something entirely different. He recast the American folk song ‘I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground’ into something new and different, part Nick Drake, part post-punk; the English sea shanty ‘Shallow Brown’ became something of a meditation, stately and glowering, owing more to post-rock’s imposing stillness than to the records that usually carry the writing credit ‘Trad Arr.’.

How could the man making this extraordinary music be so normal?

It’s of course far from unprecedented to combine folk with other music. More recently we’ve had the Gloaming, the Irish-American folk supergroup who in the 2010s became diaspora superstars. They also played something that sounded like it had been spliced with post-rock. But the Gloaming’s post-rock elements were the kind that soundtrack BBC nature documentaries about the awesome majesty of Iceland. They came from the stirring, wondrous end of things, the Sigur Ros end. What Flynn has taken from post-rock is the sort of stuff that soundtracks Netflix series about surviving in a world of reanimated corpses. His songs come from the paranoid, grubby end of things, the Mogwai and Slint end. These were songs that could draw blood.

‘My Son Tim’, a cry against the conscription of young Irishmen to fight against Napoleon, was punctuated by screeches, wails and walls of electric guitar from Brendan Jenkinson, as if Gang of Four were jamming with the Wolfe Tones. The interjections of the band were crucial – they are the shards that slash at the songs Flynn sings. Not that it is all violence: Caimin Gilmore’s upright bass-playing was sometimes reminiscent of Danny Thompson’s work with Pentangle, fluid and sunlit.

The rise of Flynn, Lankum and O’Neill is also a testimony to the enduring worth of record labels that have a genuine musical vision. All three are signed to the UK indie label Rough Trade, which has for 46 years released records because Geoff Travis and Jeanette Lee, who run it, love them rather than because they anticipate buying helicopters with the proceeds. They have produced hits and misses along the way, but at the moment Rough Trade is in a purple patch.

Margo Price might also thank the people who release records out of love. She spent several years not getting very far in Nashville before Jack White signed her to his Third Man Records and released her debut album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. I saw her play at a pub near King’s Cross off the back of that record, and she and her band were brilliant, playing hard country and revelling in the recognition of her talent.

The sea shanty ‘Shallow Brown’ became something of a meditation, stately and glowering

She’s not quite so country any longer, skewing more towards an idealised, West Coast, drivetime sound all mid-pace and melodic. At Koko, she even wore a floaty, floor-length dress for the full Fleetwood Mac effect, before swapping to sequins and cowboy boots to finish the set in her older style. But though the songs were terrific, the band decent, her voice great, and though she worked the stage like a trouper, something didn’t quite click.

I put this down to geography. I was near the top of the room, the space above me was deserted and it’s hard to feel engaged when you’re at the edge of a crowd with emptiness behind. But friends downstairs reported the same feeling of distance, as if they were performing at the crowd rather than to the crowd. Some of it, too, comes down to taste. Regular readers may be aware of my almost obsessional hatred of occasional additional percussion. Price, unfortunately, loves hopping behind a drum kit and walloping along with the band.

Still, there’s no denying her talent. Like Jenny Lewis, Price is someone who would have been a star were she a couple of generations younger but her unfortunate luck is to live at a time when her style of music no longer occupies the cultural centre.