Ibibio Sound Machine – Chopping Mountain
Today, Ibibio Sound Machine announce their new album Chopping Mountain, heralded by lead single “Concept of Love,” an Afro-disco banger that finds the band at their infectious best.
Chopping Mountain is out September 11, 2026, via Merge Records, ahead of Ibibio Sound Machine’s fall tour of the UK.
In the video accompanying “Concept of Love,” Eno Williams walks into the center of the frame and unleashes the chorus’ refrain, “What is your concept of love?”, through a vocoder with warmth and urgency as the song locks into an Afro-disco pulse and she starts to chant in her native Ibibio language.
According to Williams, the song “went through many different stages and ended 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.” The song, made in reaction to an increasingly unstable world, captures the spirit of the wider album, holding onto ideas of love, resistance, togetherness, and hope without losing sight of the dancefloor.
“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.
Recorded primarily at the band’s own Vanguard Studios in South London, Chopping Mountain marks the first Ibibio Sound Machine album produced by the band’s Max 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 nightlife 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.
Chopping Mountain, the new record by Ibibio Sound Machine — out September 11, 2026 — 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.
Williams, as always, is a siren — a once-in-a-generation frontwoman whose call, both to the dancefloor and for a better tomorrow, is impossible to resist. How she does it is a mystery. Take a song like “Return to Sender,” for instance. Inspired by a car accident in which she felt the steering wheel of her vehicle literally jump out of her hands — which she likened to “a spiritual attack by unseen forces” — the track is a sinewy, cathartic rager, a full-body workout and full-throated rejection of evil in multiple tongues, English and her native Ibibio.
She is, of course, hardly alone at the foot of Chopping Mountain. Ibibio Sound Machine — Grunhard (saxophone, keyboards), Alfred Bannerman (guitar), PK Ambrose (bass, keyboards), Joseph Amoako (drums), Afla Sackey (percussion), Scott Baylis (trumpet, keyboards), and Tony Hayden (trombone, synth) — are supernaturally tight, drawing on their roots and inspirations in highlife, disco, afrobeat, funk, post-punk, and electropop to build towering cathedrals of sound around her voice.
Continuing on the path they first charted on Pull the Rope, many of Chopping Mountain’s songs started out in jam sessions, locking in on a groove or an instrument or a lyric. “Give Me Peace,” featuring Dele Sosimi of Fela Kuti’s Egypt 80, found its way to bliss once the chant-sung lyrics “Give me peace, give me freedom, give me love with a kiss” tumbled out of Williams’ consciousness. The dub-inflected, breakbeat heavy soul that stirs to life beneath them — an entirely new sound for a band that has mastered blending a seemingly endless array of sounds — came naturally. “It’s about finding calm in a world that is trying to tear us down,” Williams and Grunhard explain. “Once we established that direction, the song seemed to write itself.”
This is, at its core, the spirit of Chopping Mountain. Against the backdrop of a dispiriting world, Ibibio Sound Machine remain hopeful, seekers of consciousness and connection. On tracks like “Concept of Love,” they are direct and earnest, sculpting an Afro-disco song around Williams’ repeated question of “What is your concept of love?” They have their theory (“When you love someone / Let them love you back”) but the song passes the idea from member to member — a thrilling guitar solo from Bannerman, Baylis’ horn stings, vocoders, and precision drumfills — in a way that creates, almost paradoxically, a space in which one can meditate on the answer or move through it. Exploring the concept further on “Love,” they deliver an ethereal slice of highlife.
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.
Ibibio Sound Machine on tour:
Jul 03-04 Glasgow, UK – WOMAD 2026
Jul 22-27 Donostia, ES – Jazzaldia 2026
Jul 30 Eeklo, BE – Helden In Het Park 2026
Aug 01 Floreffe, BE – ESPERANZAH! 2026
Aug 02 Nutley, UK – Good Vibrations Society 2006
Sep 05 Santa Cruz De Tenerife, ES – Phe Festival 2006
Sep 11 Reading, UK – Down at the Abbey
Oct 02 Bristol, UK – Lantern Hall
Oct 03 Cardiff, UK – Clwb Ifor Bach
Oct 07 Birmingham, UK – Hare & Hounds
Oct 09 Dublin, IE – Button Factory
Oct 10 Birkenhead, UK – Future Yard
Oct 15 Brighton, UK – Concorde 2
Oct 16 Oxford, UK – Cowley Workers Social Club
Oct 22 Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK – Gosforth Civic Theatre
Oct 23 Edinburgh, UK – Liquid Rooms
Oct 24 Nottingham, UK – Rescue Rooms
Nov 20 Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club
Nov 21 Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club
Nov 25 London, UK – Islington Assembly Hall
Jan 29 Abu Dhabi, AE – The Red Theatre, The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi
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