- The UK duo grows into a full four-piece band on this album of classy, exploratory Krautrock.
- Rock musicians testing out synths, drum machines, samplers and incorporating ideas from electronic music is a history almost as old as rock itself. A little rarer, however, is the opposite direction: electronic musicians looking to rock music for inspiration. When Mount Kimbie tapped Krautrock's motorik pulse and bullied their synths into sounding like guitars on Love What Survives, it was a reinvention for the duo. They had sounded unsure of where to go on their second album, Spring Fault Less Youth, which already started to pull them away from the pioneering post-dubstep of their early EPs and debut album, Crooks & Lovers.
Mount Kimbie is made up of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos, originally from Brighton and Cornwall respectively. A few years ago, Maker decided to move across the Atlantic to Los Angeles, immersing himself in hip-hop (his recent production credits include slowthai and Travis Scott), while Maker remained in London and focused on techno and DJing. For a moment, the future of Mount Kimbie looked unstable with the release of MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning, essentially two solo albums put out under the Mount Kimbie banner. OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is the most famous example of a duo testing solo waters, and notoriously, OutKast released only a soundtrack follow-up before disbanding.
Mount Kimbie's fifth album, The Sunset Violent, assuages any doubts about the group's future. The duo reunited physically, in rural California, for the sessions, and enlisted a few friends to join them—Andrea Balency-Béarn (Mount Kimbie fans may recognize her name as the feature on 2017's "You Look Certain (I'm not so sure)") and Marc Pell, both of whom are now freshly minted as official band members. Where Love What Survives was the work of two electronic musicians making Krautrock and post-punk on their own terms, The Sunset Violent is the same blueprint played by a full band.
The results are unmistakably Mount Kimbie, showcasing their love for pop, R&B, electronica and Krautrock, while also forging a new identity for themselves within indie rock. The sunset in the title might be a reference to the California sun, but in technology it refers to phasing out old software or hardware—so it could also be taken as Mount Kimbie saying goodbye to their old sound once again. Campos grew up playing guitar, having played with bands in friends when he was around 13 years old. For The Sunset Violent, he plays guitar as a lead instrument more than ever before.
As opposed to the collaboration-heavy Love What Survives or Die Cuts, there's only one outside collaborator here: honourary member King Krule, who had worked with them on both Spring Fault Less Youth and Love What Survives. And both songs that he appears on are highlights. "Boxing" overlays Krule's emotionally invested yet physically distant voice over fuzzy guitar chords, but the key to the song is the LinnDrum beat. By using a drum machine from the '80s, "Boxing" feels displaced in time, like we're listening to a shelved and forgotten college rock tape from that era rather than something made in 2024. Elsewhere, closer "Empty and Silent" repurposes NEU!'s motorik beat out of mid-'70s Germany and into modern-day California, thanks to Balency-Béarn's vocals cooing behind and smoothing out Krule's rough baritone.
At only nine tracks long, The Sunset Violent feels a little slight. "The Trail" is all pile-driving post-punk guitar chords and drum patterns, but the song starts winding down far too early, pattering out in less than three minutes when it should have chugged on for much longer. "Got Me" also doesn't breach the three-minute mark, functioning more like an interlude built out of a keyboard and drum pattern, but it smells of filler. And though the album's lyrics can be generic sad-sack indie as they come—"I tried to be that someone you really need / A shipwreck beneath your sea"—Maker and Campos have always been good with textures to direct your attention to instead, like the glistening keyboard arpeggios throughout "Dumb Guitar."
What appealed to me about Mount Kimbie's early sound was that it was a fresh, outsider take on club music from two people who were born outside of London—Campos once made the point that there was no electronic music scene around him growing up. Likewise, Mount Kimbie's take on indie rock is not strictly an imitation of a bygone genre. Older sounds—or just out-of-vogue guitars in general—are juxtaposed against modern-day production, and framed in a way that feels uniquely Mount Kimbie. If MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning felt like Mount Kimbie's Covid record, created across oceans and in isolation, The Sunset Violent is their post-pandemic LP. A reunion album, surrounded by friends, new and old.
Tracklist01. The Trail
02. Dumb Guitar
03. Shipwreck
04. Boxing feat. King Krule
05. Got Me
06. A Figure In The Surf
07. Fishbrain
08. Yukka Tree
09. Empty And Silent feat. King Krule