Hollier sees King Ropes' home state as a key element of his band's identity. "It's important to me that we're from Montana. It’s not much of a stretch to say this place has made us who we are. Montana is an incredibly beautiful place, but it's also harsh and unforgiving. The weather can be brutal and relentless and the distances are huge. It can be an isolating and inhospitable place to live, and the people can reflect that. There can be violence and poverty and substance abuse just like anywhere else, and the natural beauty of the place might make that harder to see. I think we're getting better at reflecting both sides of that in the music we're making.”

Super Natural is at once King Ropes’ most ambitious and 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. 

“In a lot of these songs, the writing is more direct,” Hollier says. “I’m saying what I’m saying and not trying to get at something in a roundabout way.” Witness, for instance, the disarmingly plainspoken “Breathing,” which starts as the  story of a mysterious breathing ailment Hollier found himself wrestling with, set to a twangy, understated groove. As the song progresses, Hollier’s focus widens into a sprawling inventory of pain and suffering around him. It is a quietly stunning song, sculpted out of empathy and the wisdom that life is a series of battles we never saw ourselves fighting.

It was a personal tragedy that led Hollier to commit seriously to his own music. “My brother was a musician,” Hollier says, “and he was much more advanced musically than I was.” In 1998, Hollier’s brother, Bill, died of a drug overdose, right around the time the two brothers had begun playing together. “I feel like, in some way, he passed this on to me,” Hollier says. “I felt like, ‘OK, this is something I can do.’ I was learning a lot of songs at that time, and I’d started writing songs. Something just sunk its teeth into 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.” 

Hollier’s complex family history hangs heavy over this batch of songs, and the presence of Bill Hollier is felt in standout tracks like “My Brother’s a Bear Now”, “Blind Eye”, and “Heart Shaped Garden.” In "Heart Shaped Garden" Hollier muses on the mysteries of loss and connection (“We’re closer now than we ever have been / Time and space, fold back around again”) before breaking into a wordless chorus that sounds like heartland rock by way of Brian Eno. 

The stirring “My Brother’s a Bear Now” stands out for its mingling of grief with surrealism: “My brother’s a bear now / I saw him swim across the river,” Hollier sings over a stark staccato groove. The song was inspired by Hollier’s recollection of his brother’s memorial service at a campground in the woods of Montana. During the service a small bear cub appeared at the other end of the campground, looking for food left around, but seemingly curious about why we were there. “Over the years, we’ve joked about it, like that was Bill, just hanging around and seeing what we’re doing now,” Hollier says. Twenty years later, Hollier spotted several bears during the weeks just after his father died. Then, when his mother was dying the following year, he was on a trail near town and heard some noise in some bushes. He watched as a young bear emerged from the woods and swam across the river. “It just seemed like, OK, there’s the bear thing again,” Hollier says. “This is like dad and Bill waiting around for mom to cross over to the other side.”

Elsewhere, the songwriter reflects on his Brooklyn years on “Greedy” and references years as a child, (and later as a parent), spent roaming around the woods on “Pockets.” 

Like Way Out West (2021),  Super Natural was recorded in Bozeman, MT at Hollier’s multipurpose warehouse space, the improbably  named  “East  Gallatin  Yacht  Club",  (there's not a  yacht  within  500  miles.)  The  music  sounds  organic and immediate, choosing raw musical chemistry over manicured digital gloss. Hollier attributes much of this intensity to bandmate Ben Roth, who engineered and mixed the record himself. “It was like working with a mad scientist a little bit,” Hollier says. “He’d sometimes take two or three hours setting up drum mics, trying things, tweaking it, because he really had a vision for a particular drum sound on each song. That's part of what gives this record the life that flows through it, giving the songs an ever-changing landscape."

Super Natural skids to a close with “Mystery,” one of the strangest and most rousing entries in the King Ropes songbook to date. The song is all circuitous melody and lo-fi clatter, rising in intensity as Hollier breaks into an impassioned yelp to recount a cryptic joke involving an onion and a rutabaga. “It’s not a mystery / But it is,” the singer repeats in ramshackle harmony, a zen refrain soon swallowed up by a whirring, rhythmic roar during the record’s final moments. It is comforting and inscrutable all at once. 

What is a mystery is the source of the creative streak King Ropes find themselves barreling through with brakeless fervor. Hollier would rather not 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 and I don't want to miss it.