That spirit permeates the band’s new album, the aptly titled Idaho. It’s not the Idaho of tourism pamphlets or ski resorts commercials. Inspired by Idaho as a kind of misunderstood underdog, the band is more interested in conveying a setting that is both remarkably gorgeous and also harsh and unforgiving. 

“That’s something I try to convey—that we’re from and of and about the West and the Western experience,” says Hollier. “I feel akin to bands like Modest Mouse and Built to Spill, not necessarily sonically, but those bands are from weird middle-of-nowhere-in-the-West places and represent that experience in some way. I feel like our songs—even if they’re not really explicitly about living here—are informed by that for sure.”

It’s fitting, then, that King Ropes’ music is full of open spaces and jagged edges. Guitars scrape and whine. Amps rumble. Rickety pianos rattle in and out of tune. Like the Old West, nothing is too refined. At the center of it all is Hollier himself, a gifted songwriter at the top of his game, surveying a land haunted by doomed relationships and reactionary politics in his odd, quivering voice. 

Riding the high of a pair of career-defining albums, 2021’s Way Out West and 2022’s Super Natural, the band spent much of the young decade zigzagging around on tour, pulling new fans into their world. On their latest, Idaho, they strive to harness that live spirit in the studio. From the soul-tinged groove of “Broken Cup” to the ZZ Top-fueled gutter-blues of “I Wanna Live Like an Animal,” it’s King Rope’s most immediate and collaborative record yet. 

“The process of recording was different from what we’ve done before,” says Hollier. “There was this sense of capturing lightning in a bottle that happened that we haven’t really done before. We’d never really just sat in a room and recorded basically live. We did two or three takes on every song and very minimal overdubs.” 

Hollier wrote the bulk of the songs during lockdown, when he and drummer Jeff Jensen were the only two members living in Bozeman. The two would get together once a week, testing out song ideas and trying to stay sane. “There was a sense of humor and a lightheartedness to a lot of these songs that was a reaction to the heaviness of the world,” says Hollier. 

Music is in Hollier’s blood. His parents were always singing in church choirs during his childhood. “We sang in the car all the time,” he says. As a teenager growing up in Montana, he rebelled by delving deep into outlaw country. “Nobody’s parents wanted us to be listening to Willie Nelson and Lefty Frizzell and Merle Haggard,” he reminisces. “In high school, we’d go to the cowboy bars here to dance, and try not to get beat up.” 

Veering from one geographic extreme to another, Hollier moved to Brooklyn in the mid-1980s, where his musical parameters exploded. There was salsa and merengue music on the streets, old-school rap in the clubs; Hollier spent time in nightclubs like Danceteria and was turned on to everyone from the Beastie Boys to Sly and Robbie. 

The death of his brother led Hollier to commit seriously to his own music. “My brother was a musician,” Hollier says, “and he was way more advanced musically than I was.” In 1998, Bill Hollier died of a drug overdose, right around the time the two brothers had begun playing together. Dave carried on the musical torch. “I feel like, in some way, he passed that on to me,” Hollier says. “I felt like, ‘OK, this is something I can do.’” 

Hollier had begun DJing at underground dance parties thrown in his Brooklyn cabinet shop. Years later, he and some friends opened their own spot, the Brooklyn Rod and Gun Club, a tiny but unforgettable joint on the Williamsburg waterfront where indie darlings Big Thief played their first-ever show. Hollier would block off Thursday nights for informal jam sessions. “That evolved into a band pretty quickly,” he says. The band, called Home for Wayward Drummers, played freewheeling three-hour sets centered around covers. Every week, Hollier would learn two or three new songs to keep the material fresh. It became a crash course in songwriting. 

“I was learning a lot of songs, and I was writing songs at the same time,” Hollier says. “Something just sunk its teeth in me and hasn’t let go. It’s endlessly fascinating to me: What is it that makes these things work or not work? There’s some mysterious magic stuff going on there.” 

By 2015, the Brooklyn Rod and Gun Club was a casualty of Brooklyn hypergentrification, and Hollier had moved back west. In 2017— after resettling in Bozeman, close enough to the mountains that bear and moose wander through the woods around town— Hollier rechristened the band King Ropes; a respectful tip of the hat to a western institution.  King Ropes/King Saddlery is a western tack store in Sheridan, WY, which carries a wide variety of saddles, reins, halters, bits, slickers…and ropes. (“People from Montana and Wyoming know King Ropes because they’re local,” Hollier notes, “but the further away you get, the less people get the reference.”) 

Inspiration struck, and it struck hard. Hollier recruited an inner circle of West Coast musicians to record and tour with—notably bassist/guitarist Ben Roth (Oberhofer/BOD) and drummer Jeff Jensen, both of whom play throughout the new record. Five King Ropes albums followed in quick succession: 2017’s Dirt, 2019’s Gravity and Friction, 2020’s Go Back Where They Came From (a suitably eclectic covers album), 2021’s Way Out West, and 2022’s Super Natural. 

It was while touring for the latter album, in February 2022, that the band stopped to spend four days at County Line recording studio in the Malibu Hills, overlooking the Pacific. The five musicians (Hollier, Roth, Jensen, Adam Wolcott Smith, and Jimi Kehoe) had never all played together as one unit. “We had no idea we’d come out of those sessions with a very close to completed album,” Hollier says.

Hollier has a gift for writing about tragedy and pain with wry humor and conversational panache. During the recording, he was reeling from a breakup with his ex-partner, with whom he shares a daughter, and channeled that angst into the material. Several songs allude to the breakup with poetic distance. “The promise of passion/I’m afraid of the dark and I’m crying inside,” Hollier laments on the impressionistic “Way Too High,” while the dreamily downbeat, country-inflected “I Wanna Ride in Your Car” tiptoes around the edges of a crumbling relationship (“You’re shooting rockets into space/I’m just a basket case”). 

That pall of heaviness is countered by moments of levity and classic-rock exuberance. On the cheekily intertextual “Radio Jane,” Hollier takes influence from the shout-out culture of early rap songs and pays homage to a song of the same name by local band the Love Darts. “It’s kind of a song about their song,” Hollier laughs. “I love their song! This should be all over the radio. At the same time, I'll do my best to one-up them in terms of making mine be the hit.” 

Several tracks later, on “I Wanna Live Like an Animal,” Hollier channels his antisocial tendencies into scuzzy hard-rock inspired by ZZ Top. The song emerged as Hollier and his bandmates were driving  through New Mexico late at night, driving to their motel in Albuquerque. “It’s 2:00am after a gig, we’re driving a totally desolate stretch of road, and I was like, ‘Alright, guys. This is the time to take a deep dive into ZZ Top,” Hollier recalls. “A couple days later, we were in the studio and the guys were just like, ‘OK, let’s lean into this ZZ Top thing.’ “Lyrically, it’s pretty simple,” Hollier adds. “It’s kind of a fuck-off song. I don’t want to be told what to do.” 

The record motors to a close with “Idaho,” a clattering and raw vignette of winter travels in the Gem State. “Real cold here, east of Coeur d'Alene/With miles to go,” Hollier sings before the whole band joins in for a round of gang vocals. 

The track caps off the latest entry in the creative streak King Ropes find themselves barreling through with brakeless fervor. Hollier tries not to question it. “I’m aware of the fact that stuff’s really clicking nicely for us and I’m just going with it,” Hollier says. “Just pushing myself a little harder than I sometimes do in terms of writing songs, because it feels like some good stuff is coming out.”

Sonic landscapes for western wanders.

Take the trip, man. 

Between mountains and sea. 

Beyond hope and after the heart break. 

Break free.  Misunderstand me.

The American West. 

The West isn’t just a place. It is a mindset. A solar system unto itself. An impossible collection of distances and dreams. The West is a promise and a lie. A mistress and a wife. The birthright here is both boom and bust. Feast and famine. There is a reason why the sun chooses to end each day West. It is the only real destination for those who never intend to stop…  

The moon rose 3 times that night. Orange and fantastic. Bigger at every glance, cresting above the foothills, the whole scene blurring at 72 miles per hour outside the window. Fast enough to make time. Slow enough to avoid trouble. Emptiness. Deep blue darkness. A mystic ribbon of cloud and headlights snaking forward. Always forward. Thoughts come quick on the open road and they leave just as fast. Metal up. Rubber down. If you are lost or hurting, longing or loving, onward is the only direction that matters…

There is a town in the distance. 

Twinkling. Beckoning. Promising. 

Gas, grass, or ass- we got what you need. 

Or are those broken stars? 

Falling against a forgotten horizon. Left to burn without witness. 

Their fire and fury soon to fade into the flow of forever. 

No way to know until you go…

Feel the pedal under the curve of your bare foot. Hot skin on cold metal. Hard edges. Soft middles. Pressure is progress when you’re chasing diamonds but gold is useless when you are lost in the woods. Maybe destinations are dumb and answers overrated. But if you ever stop seeking, you are sure to wake up wicked and jaded…

Somewhere between mountains and sea. Beyond hope and after the heart break. Free. The West isn’t just a place. It is a mindset. A solar system unto itself. An impossible collection of distances and dreams. The West is a promise and a lie. A mistress and a wife. The birthright here is both boom and bust. Feast and famine. There is a reason why the sun chooses to end each day West. It is the only real destination for those who never intend to stop…  

As the warm wind blows down the arroyo and runs head long into roar of the sea. As the mountains spool out, fading slowly into the valley below. As the night fills the gaps between the shine of the city. As the river rushes through a landscape still and silent. As the gulls wail above the roar of the surf. As we curse and fight over this heaven we call Earth. Tell me my dear, when your time finally arrives, will that last breath be an inhale or an exhale?

It is a sacred architecture of opposing ends- pumped full of expectations and abandoned dreams. It is a place and a person and all the things in between. It is you. It is me. It is everything that we see. It is more. It is less. It is the prettiest girl you know wearing a bright red dress. It is broken mirrors and ugly truths. It is the honey-hued shimmer of the Pacific at first light. It is pelicans silently in flight, their wings wide and their eyes true. Magpies in the snow and eagles at the dump. Public lands and private sins. In the West, it’s always a good time to begin…

Such is the rhythm

Such is the pace

Such is the tempo

of the human race… 

Shadows ain’t nothing but the evidence of light. So you push on through the night. On through the night…

Take the trip, man. From mountains to sea. Snow pack to sand bar. Follow the rivers. Run to the tide. Fill in those spots on the map. Ever greens to oaks, prairie grass to sea weed. Find a hot spring along the way. Maybe a casino. Or a sandwich. Or crappy cup of coffee made by a woman named Deb working the morning shift at the Kum&Go off exit 44. The journey ain’t just miles. It’s big cities and little towns. It’s wild fire and low hanging fog. Sweet corn and garlic. Avocados and dates. No body around and everybody on top of you. Coyotes and Gatorade bottles full of trucker piss. It’s a pilgrimage of pollution to a Mecca of Marvels. A paradise lost and, yet, a paradise that’s always around. The air we breathe, man, it’s always the same wether we are headed up or down… 

Ramblin’ ain’t wanderin’. And by the time you finish, I hope you’ll know why that’s so…