Chopping Mountain

Description

Chopping Mountain, the sixth album by Ibibio Sound Machine, is the clearest translation to date of the long-standing mission of the London collective: to promote love, unity, and resistance through music. The first album produced by Max Grunhard since Doko Mien (2019), it follows the breakthroughs produced by Hot Chip, Electricity (2022), and the darker Pull the Rope produced by Ross Orton (2024). Chopping Mountain seems to be drawn directly from the heart of the group. Eno Williams is, as always, a siren — a frontwoman of a generation whose call, both to the dance floor and to a better world, is impossible to resist. On "Return to Sender," inspired by a car accident she experienced as "a spiritual attack from invisible forces," she delivers a cathartic exorcism in English and Ibibio. Around her, the band — 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) — is of supernatural cohesion, drawing from highlife, disco, afrobeat, funk, post-punk, and electropop. Born from jam sessions, "Give Me Peace" with Dele Sosimi from Fela Kuti's Egypt 80 finds its way to bliss against a backdrop of soul dub and breakbeat. "Concept of Love" carves an afro-disco song around a repeated question, passed from member to member. And on the title track, Williams sets the scene: "When pebble disturbs the water / Ripples over yonder." The work of liberation is long, but it is not without joy — this album overflows with it.