Chopping Mountain

Description

Chopping Mountain, the new record by Ibibio Sound Machine is the clearest rendering yet of the London collectives longstanding mission to promote love, unity, and resistance through music. It is the bands sixth full-length record, and the first to feature the bands Max Grunhard as producer since 2019s 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. How she does it is a mystery. Take a song like Return to Sender, for instance. Inspired by a car accident in which she felt the steering wheel of her vehicle literally jump out of her hands which she likened to a spiritual attack by unseen forces the track is a sinewy, cathartic rager, a full-body workout and full-throated rejection of evil in multiple tongues, English and her native Ibibio.

She is, of course, hardly alone at the foot of Chopping Mountain. Ibibio Sound Machine Grunhard (saxophone, keyboards), Alfred Bannerman (guitar), PK Ambrose (bass, keyboards),Joseph Amoako (drums), Afla Sackey (percussion), Scott Baylis (trumpet, keyboards), and Tony Hayden (trombone, synth) are supernaturally tight, drawing on their roots and inspirations in highlife, disco, afrobeat, funk, post-punk, and electropop to build towering cathedrals of sound around her voice.

Continuing on the path they first charted on Pull the Rope, many of Chopping Mountains songs started out in jam sessions, locking in on a groove or an instrument or a lyric. Give Me Peace, featuring Dele Sosimi of Fela Kutis Egypt 80, found its way to bliss once the chant-sung lyrics Give me peace, give me freedom, give me love with a kiss tumbled out of Williams consciousness. The dub-inflected, breakbeat heavy soul that stirs to life beneath them an entirely new sound for a band that has mastered blending a seemingly endless array of sounds came naturally. Its about finding calm in a world that is trying to tear us down, Williams and Grunhard explain. Once we established that direction, the song seemed to write itself.

This is, at its core, the spirit of Chopping Mountain. Against the backdrop of a dispiriting world, Ibibio Sound Machine remain hopeful, seekers of consciousness and connection. On tracks like Concept of Love, they are direct and earnest, sculpting an Afro-disco song around Williams repeated question of What is your concept of love? They have their theory (When you love someone / Let them love you back) but the song passes the idea from member to member a thrilling guitar solo from Bannerman, Baylis horn stings, vocoders, and precision drumfills in a way that creates, almost paradoxically, a space in which one can meditate on the answer or move through it. Exploring the concept further on Love, they deliver an ethereal slice of highlife.

This heady brew of disparate styles and points of origin melds and pulls itself apart across the whole of Chopping Mountain, its songs united in that they are the sharpest tools Ibibio Sound Machine can bring to bear in the present moment. They present the struggle for freedom as a communal one, in which even the smallest movement contributes to the end game. As Williams sings in the title track, When pebble disturbs the water / Ripples over yonder / Force of a sling shot hits you / Chopping mountain rock asunder. The work of liberation is long and difficult, but it is not without joy here is an album bursting with it.