Audiopile Review: Look, we’re going to level with you. We kinda lost track of Mount Kimbie after their delightfully danceable, dubstep-influenced debut ‘Crooks & Lovers’. These things happen. Maybe it was just impossible to imagine this UK duo maintaining the youthful verve of that debut. The rough edges of these things tend to get sanded off, don’t they? Like, one of the great things about early Mount Kimbie was you got the impression they loved The Rapture’s ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ as much as they loved Skream’s ‘Midnight Request Line’. Fast-forward 14 years, and we find ourselves confronted with Mount Kimbie making a full-on indie rock record. Okay, that might be overstating it a bit, but ‘The Sunset Violent’ is startlingly shoegazey and song based. They’ve expanded to a quartet and King Krule lends vocals to a couple of tracks. The results are very different from ‘Crooks & Lovers’ but similarly infectious. This seems like it might be your favourite summer album in waiting, but it’s going to sound just fine in the springtime too. Apparently, they never lost that youthful verve. Our bad.

The Sunset Violent began in a disused frat house in the American Yucca Valley. Kimbie’s founding members Dominic Maker & Kai Campos began work on their first proper album together since 2017’s Love What Survives – the decision was made to leave London. Campos and Maker relocated for a month to a town in the middle of a desert. The resulting album, finished in London with longtime confidante Dillip Harris and their band mates Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell, is 37 minutes of Mount Kimbie at simultaneously their most daring and their most giddily infectious.