Released: 05/04/24
Very often it’s hard for a band to come back from an extended hiatus: audiences can be fickle, and there is always a steady stream of new bands coming through vying for your fans’ attention. This didn’t bode well for Mount Kimbie, the London-based group headed up by Dominic Maker and Kai Campos, who, while not idle exactly (see the 2022 ambient-grime curio MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning, for which Maker and Campos teamed up with Slowthai, Danny Brown, James Blake, and more), the last album proper was 2017’s Love What Survives. As the old adage goes, a week’s a long time in politics; and as the new adage that I’m just now coining goes, seven years away from the electro-pop/future garage game is an age.
Thankfully, Maker and Campos seem to have been acutely cognisant of the need to make a killer record to assuage obsolescence, for The Sunset Violent is an abolute corker. While the highlight is ‘Dumb Guitar’, on which Andrea Balency-Béarn’s gorgeous, languid vocal rests atop Mount Kimbie’s signature strange brew of coruscating garage (genre: rock) guitars and garage (genre: not rock, the other one) elasticated sub-y bass and synths, every track is fantastic, begging repeat listens. If you’ve ever wondered what My Bloody Valentine would sound like if Kevin Shields swapped out his obsession with vintage analogue mixing desks for Ableton and VST plugins, then The Sunset Violent is the excellent answer.