"The New Faith," by Jake Blount, debuted in September.

Scour the history of folk music and you’ll find no shortage of albums about love and lust, heartbreak and hatred, spirituality and the supernatural, murder, death, more murder and more death.

Jake Blount knows this very well. He is, after all, not just a celebrated folk singer and banjo player but also a respected scholar who specializes in the early folk music of Black Americans. In college, he studied the traditional music of Black communities in the United States, and in 2017, he earned his degree in ethnomusicology — the same year he released his debut EP, “Reparations.”

These days, the Rhode Island-based Blount is one of the most compelling new(ish) forces in contemporary folk music, and it’s not just because of his book smarts or his skills with a stringed instrument in his hands. It’s also because of the curiosity and the ambition that courses through his music, most viscerally on his new album “The New Faith,” released in September on the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label. A dozen tracks long, it’s not a song cycle about love and/or heartbreak and/or death, but an Afrofuturist concept album that explores the future of Black music and Black life in a world ravaged by environmental disasters as a result of climate change.

Blount provided more details in an interview with Bandcamp Daily on the album’s release day:

“The record depicts a religious service being held by the descendants of Black American refugees who fled from the South to the North in search of arable land and a stable climate during the man-made climate crisis,” he said.

“So, this is probably a few centuries from where we are now in terms of a timeline. The goal was to examine the traditional Black folk music of the future. Since I have done a lot of traditional Black folk music of the past and the present, I wanted to think forward about how that would work. This is meant to be a field recording from a few hundred years in the future.”

Musically, “The New Faith” finds Blount pushing and pulling on the boundaries of folk music by taking old hymns and spiritual songs, delivering them with stunning clarity and vigor, and updating their arrangements with modern elements such as rapped verses, electric guitar and looping technology and digitally processed sounds. The result is a collection of performances that set a futuristic scene by filtering ancient music through the uncertainties and anxieties of current times.

Blount’s fresh perspective on folk music is a beautiful thing to behold, and Central

Oregon’s music lovers will have a chance to do just that Thursday night at The Belfry in Sisters — an intimate venue that’ll be an ideal spot to watch him do what he does and to hear the message embedded within.

“In order to make the progress we need to make — especially thinking on the level of something like climate change — a global problem that everyone is gonna have to fix together, you have to find a way to welcome people in,” Blount told Bandcamp Daily. “I think that coming through these old church songs you listen for the lessons, they have to teach us about who we are and how we should be. The music has something to say about where we are right now.”

What: Jake Blount

When: 7 p.m. Thursday; doors open 6 p.m.,

Where: The Belfry, 302 E. Main Ave., Sisters

Cost: $20, $10 (age 18 and younger), free (age 5 and younger)

Contact: sistersfolkfestival.org