About

After two stellar EPs, this post-dubstep duo again turns club and R&B influences into something, like Boards of Canada or James Blake, best enjoyed alone.

Mount Kimbie are two friends who met in college, didn't exactly have the same taste in music, made some field recordings, dumped them into Fruity Loops, and started working. Their first two EPs, Sketch on Glass and Maybes, came out on the British dubstep label Hotflush, but didn't sound like much like their peers-- and that's one of the reasons they were so good. No pomp, no anxiety, no apocalyptic drops, no airhorns. In a recent video interview, Dom Maker-- one half of the group-- talked about his appreciation for TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which is probably not the way to impress dance-music purists, but it is a way to prove you're creative enough to ignore genre purity. It's why Crooks & Lovers is highly anticipated by such a small community of listeners-- and also why it has such a good chance of being appreciated by a larger one.

When an interviewer from The Fader said he'd tried to search for Mount Kimbie on Google Maps but couldn't find anything, Kai Campos-- the other half of the group-- explained, "It's a place inside all of us where buses arrive on time." Not a cloud-scraping peak where the sunsets burn pink and white for miles, not a metaphor for the grandeur of creation, just a small town with reliable public transportation-- a beautiful, small, and clever answer for a beautiful, small, and clever album. - Pitchfork