Newly-expanded London group Mount Kimbie have emerged with a new record, The Sunset Violent, rich with hooks and textures informed by their stay in the U.S.’ Yucca Valley. Their full-length drops on April 5th via Warp Records and DSPs.

With their fourth album since core members Dominic Maker and Kai Campos formed the group in 2008, Mount Kimbie find themselves inverting the guitars-to-electronics indie rock trope. Campos’s guitar playing is fresh and tasteful, coloring the synth-laden landscapes with progressions and riffs that toe the line between noisier shoegaze and big-ticket indie rock. Guitar-led bands often find themselves toying with foreign gadgets as they reach the apex of their careers (see: Radiohead), but Mount Kimbie, known for their electronic endeavors, have only just begun to allow the guitar to shine in a setting not typically dominated by the instrument, one riddled with keys and rigid drum machine lines.

King Krule remains a favorite feature of the band, appearing on “Boxing” and “Empty and Silent,” his fourth and fifth guest spots in the history of the artists’ collaboration. The latter, the album’s closer, is a standout track that builds but never explodes, demonstrating a calculated restraint that’s sure to boil over live. It’s an ode to loneliness and overthinking, a rumination on the stark beauty of solitude that one can only realize in early-morning strolls through sleeping cities.

While the vastness of the American desert informs much of the record, there are still elements of danceable city clutter, as seen in mid-album highlight “A Figure In The Surf” and its metronomic rhythm guitar playing and calculated keyboard crescendos. The sounds and atmospheres shift throughout the record but never lose the plot.

The Sunset Violent is an important record for the development of indie rock, a genre dominated by its influences and lineages. The acts that will keep guitar-driven music alive are the ones that continue to reinvent it, drawing on inspirations beyond the known pantheon. Mount Kimbie have contributed a solid, thorough, satisfying record in The Sunset Violent, a rewarding, genre-bending listen.

Pre order The Sunset Violent by Mount Kimbie HERE