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. This heady brew of disparate styles and points of origin melds and pulls itself apart across the whole of Chopping Mountain, its songs united in that they are the sharpest tools Ibibio Sound Machine can bring to bear in the present moment. They present the struggle for freedom as a communal one, in which even the smallest movement contributes to the end game. As Williams sings in the title track, “When pebble disturbs the water / Ripples over yonder / Force of a sling shot hits you / Chopping mountain rock asunder.” The work of liberation is long and difficult, but it is not without joy — here is an album bursting with it.

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