Mount Kimbie
The Sunset Violent
WARP
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Dom Maker and Kai Campos’ first couple of years making music as Mount Kimbie offered only the slightest indication of where their career might eventually lead. Early releases such as 2009’s Maybes EP and their 2010 debut fell-length Crooks & Lovers found them swimming upstream in a current of dubstep and future garage, applying a glitchy funk and unconventional playfulness amid a landscape of quartz-timed, party-ready bass drops. They were often transparent about their unlikely influences outside of beatmakers and BPMs; early on, Maker registered his appreciation for bands like TV on the Radio and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But at their core, Mount Kimbie still created artfully idiosyncratic dance music.
Once a duo, now a proper band on The Sunset Violent, Mount Kimbie have fully transformed into making hypnotic indie rock like that of the artists they once name-dropped in interviews. They’ve been building up to this moment for a while; their 2017 album Love What Survives thrived on the borderline between dance music and post-punk, finding ample ground to uncover in the space between “Ceremony” and “Blue Monday.” Since then, their lineup doubled, adding Mark Pell and Andrea Balency-Béarn in 2023 and, at least for the time being, they’ve traded their samplers for guitars.
The filtered sound of analog synths that opens The Sunset Violent might make you presume otherwise, but that dramatic wash of electronics provides only the briefest prologue before the sound of scraggly rock guitar takes over. “Dumb Guitar”—not nearly as lunkheaded as its name suggests—is a more fluid entanglement of synth-pop and gloomy post-punk, Maker and Balency-Béarn trading off vocal duties within a gorgeously melancholy pop gem. The album’s two collaborations with King Krule’s Archy Marshall are immediate highlights, his slacker baritone offering understated melodies perfectly suited to the group’s gloomy dream-pop approach on closer “Empty and Silent” and the dreamily distorted “Boxing.”
But when Mount Kimbie grow more transparent with their sampladelic background the album grows even more stunning, as on the dazzling cascade of piano twinkles on “Got Me” or the synth-washed psychedelia of “A Figure in the Surf.” If 2022’s MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning proved that their beatmaking days were far from behind them, The Sunset Violent suggests that the group has a lot more exploration ahead within the context of a proper rock band.
Not every idea here is necessarily a revelation—the scruffy, hazy “Fishbrain” blurs the line between garage rock and shoegaze, enjoyable enough but one of the few moments where the group begins to dip into anonymity. But the overall impression is one of a band enjoying the possibilities of a new approach and a new configuration, breaking conventions and shattering expectations—and seemingly having a lot of fun doing it.
