Ibibio Sound Machine

Ibibio Sound Machine was formed in London in the early 2010s when producers Max Grunhard, Leon Brichard and Benji Bouton set out to fuse the West African funk and highlife they loved with the drum-and-bass and post-punk textures of the British club scene^[1]. Needing a voice to front the project, they approached singer Eno Williams, who was born in London but spent much of her childhood in Nigeria, immersed in the mainly Christian culture of the Ibibio region of the country's southeast, where she absorbed highlife, Nigerian gospel and a wide range of African and Western pop^[2]. Her mother, whose native tongue was Ibibio, filled her childhood with folk tales and children's stories from that heritage, source material Williams later drew on directly, writing lyrics in the Ibibio language that blend traditional narrative and morality with modern themes^[2]. Guitarist Alfred Kari Bannerman and percussionist Anselmo Netto joined as the project grew from a studio experiment into a full live band.

The band released its debut single, "Let's Dance," in January 2014 on Soundway Records, with a self-titled debut album following that March^[1]. They signed to Merge Records in 2016 and released their second album, Uyai, in 2017, building steadily toward the wider recognition that came with 2022's Hot Chip-produced Electricity, followed by 2024's Pull the Rope^[1]. Now an eight-piece ensemble featuring Scott Baylis, Tony Hayden, Joseph Amoako and Philip PK Ambrose alongside its founding members, the group released its sixth album, Chopping Mountain, on September 11, 2026 via Merge, the first time since 2019's Doko Mien that the band worked without an outside producer, with Grunhard himself taking the helm^[3]. Across more than a decade, Ibibio Sound Machine has built its identity around treating the dancefloor as a site of both celebration and resistance, pairing Williams's Ibibio-rooted storytelling with a sound that refuses to sit still inside any single genre.