Chopping Mountain

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. How she does it is a mystery. 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 Mountain’s 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 Kuti’s 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. “It’s 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.

Released: September 2026
Cat: MRG886LP-C1
Label: Merge

Listen

Tracklist

SIDE A
1. Burning in Lagos
2. Chopping Mountain
3. When You Want to Dance
4. Concept of Love

SIDE B
5. Return to Sender
6. Menso
7. Love
8. Kukuru
9. River Don’t Rush

NOTE: CD includes the additional track “Give Me Peace [feat. Dele Sosimi]”