NEW ALBUM, MAY 26
about the band
Super Natural, King Ropes’ fifth album, is at once their most ambitious and most intimate work, expanding the parameters of the band’s desert rock and ragged americana sound. It is buoyed by a directness that brings out Hollier’s most stirring songwriting to date. Hollier has a gift for writing about tragedy and pain with wry humor and conversational bluntness. Long-simmering family trauma, visions of animal reincarnation, mysterious respiratory ailments — all are worthy songwriting prompts as the record vacillates from the pounding rhythms of “Hello Sun” and thick, stoner-rock roar of “Drunk Donny” to the tenderness of “Sure,” a sorrowful, synth-driven ode to regret, and the quietly stunning, disarmingly plainspoken “Breathing”.
Guitars, Vocals, Noise, Songwriting / Dave Hollier
Bass, Guitars, Syths, Piano, Sorcery / Ben Roth
Drums, Percussion, Vibe / Jeff Jensen
Cello / Sam Hollier (not pictured)
live
what they're saying
“Lo-fi Americana/psych outfit King Ropes evoke the striking and expansive landscapes of their native Montana, offering up a homebrew of caustic folk yarns and chunky garage rockers. The band deftly balances thrilling guitar riffs with more nuanced arrangements that crawl under your skin and take up permanent residence. Feedback roars with an unexpected ferocity across these tracks, jolting tempos into the upper atmospheres.
With their new single, “Halfway Did”, the band lopes through a selection of roughhewn rock territories, with Hollier’s compelling voice channeling the odd angles of Lou Reed and Bob Mould. The guitars are prickly and aggrieved as the drums batter away at your senses.”
“[Magical Floating Eye] is certainly an intriguing door into [King Ropes’] softly weird world… There’s a little of Kurt Wagner’s husky, declamatory warmth and observation to their thang; a touch of the Malkmus absurds, a little Mr E, too; all wrapped up in a surreal flow and groovily slacker guitars and mellotron that seeps into your brain, epiphany and extrapolated imagery, free-associating lyrical flow: “A magical floating eye on a blue plate hanging on a wall in a motel in Deer Lodge, Montana / Might make you free...”
“Occupying the same melodic space as Purple Mountains or Lambchop, [‘Girls Like Us’] sways with an inherent grace and echoes through the deep chambers of your heart. ”
“ [The] stellar but vastly under-appreciated rock outfit King Ropes’ new album, Gravity and Friction, [offers] a goldmine of tracks that persevere to the true essence of what a meaningful indie band should and always be— eclectic, un-cliche, mood swinging, shades of psychedelic and yes— sad in all the best ways.”
