Chopping Mountain

Chopping Mountain is the sixth studio album from the London-based collective Ibibio Sound Machine, released on September 11, 2026 via Merge Records^[1]. It was recorded at the band's Vanguard studio in South London, and marks the first time since 2019's Doko Mien that the group has worked without an outside producer, instead handing the reins to founding member and saxophonist Max Grunhard^[2].

The ten-track record follows 2022's breakthrough Electricity and 2024's Pull the Rope, and the band describes it as their clearest statement yet of a longstanding mission built around love, unity and resistance^[2]. Critics have framed it as a response to global instability that refuses to abandon the dancefloor, holding love, resistance, togetherness and hope in the same breath as pure physical joy^[3]. Musically it braids West African highlife, Afrobeat, post-punk, soul and electronic production into a sound reviewers have called an unlikely but never clashing patchwork^[1].