Ibibio Sound Machine announce new album ‘Chopping Mountain’, share new single ‘Concept of Love’

IBIBIO SOUND MACHINE
Announce New Album

Chopping Mountain

Out 11 September via Merge

Watch the video to the lead single ‘Concept of Love’ here

Photo credit: Simon Webb

Ibibio Sound Machine announce their new album Chopping Mountain, out 11 September via Merge Records, and today share its lead single ‘Concept of Love’.

In the video accompanying the track, Eno Williams walks into the centre of the frame and unleashes the chorus refrain, ‘What is your concept of love?’, through a vocoder with warmth and urgency as the track locks into an Afro-disco pulse and she starts to chant in her native Ibibio language.

‘Concept of Love’ began life through a long process of reshaping and rebuilding before arriving at its final form as a soulful, electronic fusion that captures the spirit of the wider album, one that was made in reaction to an increasingly unstable world, holding onto ideas of love, resistance, togetherness and hope without losing sight of the dancefloor.

Williams explains that ‘Concept of Love’ “went through many different stages and ended up with a soulful, electronic Afro-disco feel. What you give out into the world is what you receive back, it’s beautiful to be loved”

Recorded primarily at the band’s own Vanguard Studios in South London, Chopping Mountain marks the first Ibibio Sound Machine album produced by Grunhard since 2019’s Doko Mien. Following the Hot Chip-produced Electricity and the darker, club-focused direction of Pull the Rope, their new record feels both expansive and deeply rooted, drawing on the earthy textures of classic West African highlife alongside post-punk, Afrobeat, soul and electronic music.

Across the album, the eight-piece band sound sharper and more connected than ever, building songs through live jams, rhythmic experiments and instinctive interplay. Whether channeling the euphoric disco energy of ‘When You Want To Dance’, the spiritual intensity of ‘Return To Sender’ or the soulful highlife of ‘Love’, Chopping Mountain presents Ibibio Sound Machine as a group still evolving, still searching, and still firmly committed to joy as an act of resistance.