Chopping Mountain [CD]

Ibibio Sound Machine - Chopping Mountain [CD]

Chopping Mountain, the new record by Ibibio Sound Machine is the clearest rendering yet of the London collective's longstanding mission to promote love, unity, and resistance through music. It is the band's sixth full-length record, and the first to feature the band's Max Grunhard as producer since 2019's Doko Mien. Following their Hot Chip-produced breakthrough Electricity (2022) and the darker, clubbier inflection of the Ross Orton-produced Pull the Rope (2024), Chopping Mountain feels like it was pulled directly from the hearts and experiences of the Eno Williams and Grunhard-led band.

Williams, as always, is a siren, a once-in-a-generation frontwoman whose call, both to the dancefloor and for a better tomorrow, is impossible to resist. Ibibio Sound Machine draws on highlife, disco, afrobeat, funk, post-punk, and electropop to build towering cathedrals of sound around her voice.

Against the backdrop of a dispiriting world, Ibibio Sound Machine remain hopeful, seekers of consciousness and connection. This heady brew of disparate styles melds and pulls itself apart across the whole of Chopping Mountain, an album that presents the struggle for freedom as a communal one - difficult, but not without joy.